Following his historic three-orbit flight aboard Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962, astronaut John Glenn was feted with ticker-tape parades and public celebrations in early March, a wave of national pride that underscored how deeply the space race had gripped the American public. His flight had come nearly a year after Yuri Gagarin's, but it proved the US could compete in orbital spaceflight.
John Glenn's flight aboard Friendship 7 had been a nail-biting affair, nearly aborted after a sensor falsely indicated his heat shield was loose, forcing mission control to leave his retrorocket pack attached during reentry as a precaution. He splashed down safely in the Atlantic after just under five hours, having orbited Earth three times.
The public reaction was immediate and overwhelming. Glenn met President Kennedy, addressed a joint session of Congress, and was paraded through the streets of Washington and New York in the days that followed, celebrations that stretched into early March 1962 and drew crowds numbering in the millions.
Glenn's flight came nearly ten months after Gagarin's pioneering orbit and Alan Shepard's earlier suborbital hop, but symbolically it mattered enormously: it proved American astronauts and engineers could match Soviet achievements in orbital spaceflight, reenergizing NASA's momentum toward the Moon.