The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

162 Glavcosmos
John Glenn Glenn dons his
silver Mercury pressure suit in
preparation for launch aboard
Friendship 7 on February 20,
1962. NASA
It will carry two instruments: the Large Area Telescope,
sensitive to gamma rays in the 200 MeV to 300 GeV
range, and the Burst Monitor, for detecting gamma-ray
bursts. Following a one-year sky survey, GLAST will be
available to scientists for particular research projects. A
joint mission involving NASA, the U.S. Department of
Energy, and institutions in France, Germany, Sweden,
Italy, and Japan, GLAST is scheduled for launch in September
2006.
Glavcosmos
The Soviet Union’s contact agency for space affairs,
based at the Ministry of Machine Building in Moscow.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the
interface between Russia’s space activities and the outside
world became the newly formed Russian Space Agency
(RKA).
Glenn, John Herschel, Jr. (1921–)
One of the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the
first American to orbit the Earth; decades later, he became
the oldest human ever to travel in space. Glenn enlisted in
the Naval Aviation Cadet Program shortly after Pearl Harbor
and was commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1943.
He subsequently served in combat in the South Pacific
and in the Korean conflict, flying 149 missions in the two
wars, and received many honors including the Distinguished
Flying Cross (on six occasions) and the Air Medal
with 18 clusters. For several years Glenn was a test pilot on
Navy and Marine Corps jet fighters and attack aircraft, set-