See John Glenn’s Career on the Cover of LIFE Magazine

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Former Ohio U.S. Senator and astronaut John Glenn—the first American to orbit the Earth and the third in space—died on Thursday at 95.

As the above gallery shows, the American hero was a fixture in LIFE Magazine throughout the Space Race era, as the U.S. strove to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s promise to beat the Soviets to the Moon by the end of the 1960s. (The Soviet Union got a head start by successfully launching Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, on Oct. 4, 1957, and making Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first human in space on April 12, 1961.) Glenn took this mission seriously. As he told LIFE in 1960, “Anyone who doesn’t want to be first doesn’t belong in this program.”

Glenn became the first American to circle the globe on Feb. 20, 1962. He did three loops in 4 hours and 56 minutes—at speeds of more than 17,000 mph.

“Weightlessness, at least for a period of a few hours, is no problem at all in spaceflight,” he wrote in a minute-by-minute story of the historic flight for LIFE’s March 9, 1962, issue. The essay’s title: If You’re All Shook Up, You Shouldn’t Be There.

Another surprising, but inexplicable finding of the mission, were the greenish-yellow lights spotted during the first rays of sunrise as he was crossing the Pacific Ocean toward the U.S. Though Glenn wrote that he didn’t know what they were, they gave him an opportunity to summon not just his bravery but also his capacity to appreciate beauty:

I thought for a minute that I must have tumbled upside-down and was looking up at a new field of stars….spread out as far as I could see, were literally thousands of tiny luminous objects that glowed in the black sky like fireflies. I was riding slowly through them, and the sensation was like walking backwards through a pasture where someone had waved a wand and made all the fireflies stop right where they were and glow steadily…I thought perhaps I’d stumbled into the lost batch of needles the Air Force had tried to set up in orbit for communications purposes. But I could think of no reason why needles should glow like fireflies, nor did they look like needles. As far as I know, the true identity of these particles is still a mystery.

Sept. 14, 1959 cover of LIFE magazine—group portrait of Project Mercury astronauts (R-L): Top: Walter Schirra; Alan Shepard; Middle: John Glenn; Scott Carpenter; Donald Slayton; Bottom: Leroy Cooper; Virgil Grissom.
Sept. 14, 1959 cover of LIFE magazine—group portrait of Project Mercury astronauts (R-L): Top: Walter Schirra; Alan Shepard; Middle: John Glenn; Scott Carpenter; Donald Slayton; Bottom: Leroy Cooper; Virgil Grissom.Ralph Morse—LIFE Magazine
March 3, 1961 cover of LIFE magazine— group portrait of Mercury astronauts John Glenn, Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard.
March 3, 1961 cover of LIFE magazine— group portrait of Mercury astronauts John Glenn, Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard.Ralph Morse—LIFE Magazine
Feb.2, 1962 cover of LIFE magazine— astronaut John Glenn, "Making of a Brave Man."
Feb.2, 1962 cover of LIFE magazine— astronaut John Glenn, "Making of a Brave Man."Ralph Morse—LIFE Magazine
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March 2, 1962 cover of LIFE magazine — astronaut John Glenn back from space.Dean Conger—LIFE Magazine
March 9, 1962 cover of LIFE magazine — "My Own Story of the Orbit" by John Glenn.
March 9, 1962 cover of LIFE magazine — "My Own Story of the Orbit" by John Glenn.Ralph Morse—LIFE Magazine

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Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com