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Obama and Biden mourn death of John Glenn

by Jordan Fabian - 12/08/16 4:24 PM ET

President Obama on Thursday mourned the death of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth and the last surviving member of the country’s original group of astronauts.

“With John’s passing, our nation has lost an icon and Michelle and I have lost a friend,” Obama said in a statement.

{mosads}Glenn, 95, died on Thursday surrounded by family at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio, where he kept a home.

In 1962, Glenn climbed into a tiny Mercury capsule atop an Atlas rocket in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and blasted into space. He orbited the earth three times, matching a feat the Soviet Union accomplished a year earlier.

Obama said the astronaut’s flight “lifted the hopes of a nation,” adding that his feat “reminded us that with courage and a spirit of discovery there’s no limit to the heights we can reach together.”

“John always had the right stuff, inspiring generations of scientists, engineers and astronauts who will take us to Mars and beyond — not just to visit, but to stay,” the president said.

After leaving the astronaut corps, Glenn worked in private business before serving four terms in the Senate as a Democrat.

He retuned to space one last time in 1998, his final year in the upper chamber, aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

Obama awarded Glenn the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor — in 2012.

In a statement later Thursday, Vice President Joe Biden and his wife Jill said they were “blessed” to have worked with and been friends with the Glenn family for decades.

“Any minute spent with John Glenn was a blessing. Because for all his heroism that history will remember — in war, in space, in public life — you felt something deeper. You felt his capacity to love — the country he inspired, the people of Ohio he served. And most especially, love for his Annie, a hero in her own right, and together, they forged a true partnership that bore the weight of fame and responsibility with the humility and sense of duty that defined them as the greatest of America’s greatest generation,” the Bidens said.

They wrote that his family should find solace in the fact that “future generations of Americans, when tested and challenged, will find a model for how to explore, serve, and love. For if there is ever a message to send beyond our time here on our Earth for what it means to be an American, it is the life of John Glenn.”

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