Fifty 
years ago on Monday, astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth when an Atlas rocket carrying his Mercury capsule Friendship 7 blasted off from Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla., lifting him into space. Over the course of a mission slightly less than five hours in duration, Glenn circled the Earth three times before splashing down in the capsule in the Atlantic Ocean about 800 miles southeast of Bermuda, where a Navy destroyer retrieved him. Glenn’s Feb. 20, 1962, mission came some 10 months after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth. (NASA’s Friendship 7 webpage) (See Associated Press report, via Politico, and Fox News report.)
Members of the Air Force Reserve’s 920th Rescue Wing helped save 11 airplane crash survivors off the coast of Florida on May 12. The Reserve Airmen were flying an HC-130J Combat King II and an HH-60W Jolly Green II on a routine training flight when a Coast Guard call diverted…