Friendship 7 (Mercury-Atlas 6)

John Glenn completed three orbits of the Earth aboard Friendship 7 during the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission on February 20, 1962. The entire flight lasted approximately four hours and 55 minutes from launch to splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.

Friendship 7 made John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth, a milestone that helped close the perceived gap with the Soviet Union, which had already achieved orbital flight with Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 mission in April 1961. The successful mission was a major propaganda and morale boost for NASA's Mercury program and demonstrated that the United States could compete in crewed spaceflight.

During the flight, ground controllers received telemetry indicating that the heat shield on Friendship 7 might have come loose, which could have been catastrophic during reentry. Mission Control instructed Glenn to keep the retrorocket pack attached to the heat shield during reentry rather than jettisoning it, in hopes the retaining straps would hold the shield in place; Glenn survived the harrowing reentry safely and the signal was later determined to have been a false alarm.

The Friendship 7 spacecraft is on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. It is one of the most visited artifacts in the museum's collection, housed alongside other landmark spacecraft from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.