Half a century ago, John Glenn went out for a pack of gum. That's the way he described it, anyway. "Well, I'm going down to the corner to buy some chewing gum," he told his wife Annie, just as he told her before every mission he flew as a fighter pilot. It was a little incantation that always brought him home safely, and it worked again on Feb. 20, 1962, when Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, flying a Mercury capsule so tiny that you didn't so much ride in it as wear it. The three-orbit, five-hour mission of...
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