Mercury Friendship 7
McDonnell Aircraft Corporation · 1962
A small black bell of corrugated metal, barely big enough for one man, with the words United States and the name Friendship 7 painted on its side. Inside it, on the twentieth of February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, circling three times in just under five hours. The Soviet Union had beaten the United States to space twice, with Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, and Glenn's flight, watched live by a hundred million people, was the moment the American programme caught up. He came home a national hero and eventually a senator.
The Mercury capsule was designed to be as simple as possible: a cone with a heat shield at the wide end, a small window and a periscope for the pilot, and the corrugated black shingles that you see, which carried away the heat of re entry. Glenn sat facing the shield, on his back, and could just move his arms. Look at the hatch, blown open by explosive bolts after splashdown, and the scorched patches on the shingles. During the flight a faulty sensor suggested that the heat shield had come loose, and Glenn was told to keep the retro rocket pack strapped on during descent. He watched burning pieces of it fly past his window and wondered whether it was the shield. It was not.
Glenn's children named the spacecraft, and the name was painted on by an artist from the Disney studios. After the flight it toured the world before entering the Smithsonian in 1967, and it has been in the Milestones hall since the building opened in 1976. It returned with the hall in July 2025. Glenn flew again in 1998 aboard the Space Shuttle at the age of seventy seven, still the oldest person to orbit the Earth, and died in 2016. Compare the capsule with the Apollo module in Destination Moon: seven years separate them, and a whole leap in ambition.
Did You Know? Glenn's children chose the name Friendship 7, and a Disney artist was called in to paint it on the capsule by hand.
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