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 Glenn (Alberta) up the creek to set up another farmstead - near the banks of Fish Creek, just east of Macleod Trail in what is now Midnapore, Calgary. There John Glenn started the construction of his historic irrigation system — this was 19 years before the Alberta Irrigation Company started their first project near Lethbridge, Alberta. Glenn built an earth and rock dam about a half a mile west of Macleod Trail and diverted water from the creek into a ditch which diverted the water to irrigate his fields east of the Trail. This irrigation scheme also worked to supply water for