John Glenn was not popular with the other astronauts. Glenn was the backup pilot for Shepard and Grissom on the first two manned Project Mercury flights, the sub-orbital missions Mercury-Redstone 3 and Mercury-Redstone 4. Glenn was selected for Mercury-Atlas 6, NASA's first manned orbital flight, with Carpenter as his backup. Putting a man in orbit would achieve one of Project Mercury's most important goals. Shepard and Grissom had named their spacecraft "Freedom 7" and "Liberty Bell 7". The numeral 7 had originally been the production number of Shepard's spacecraft, but had come to represent the Mercury 7. Glenn named his spacecraft, number
John Thomas Glenn at Spring St and Marietta which was commissioned by the George Fuller Company to coincide with the Spring Street Viaduct which they were building at the time. It was completed in 1923 and named for him. John Thomas Glenn John Thomas Glenn (March 21, 1844March 14, 1899) was the 31st Mayor of Atlanta from 1889 to 1891, and the son of another Atlanta mayor, Luther Glenn, and like his father an attorney at law. At the beginning of the American Civil War he was attending the University of Georgia where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree just before the