Special Guest Blogger: John Glenn

When it comes to space travel, most of us remember the Sovit Union Dog Laika, Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong but all the other astronauts and missions tend to get jumbled together in a hazy mess but it was the competition between the Soviets in the red corner and the Americans in the red, white and blue one which pushed us both onwards and upwards to explore above the clouds.
By 1962 America was having its backside paddled by the Soviets in the Space Race and America's official response was to contemplate nuking the moon to stop the Soviets from making a landing on it but fortunately the United States came to the decision that exploding a nuclear bomb on an orbiting planetary body for no particular reason might make them come across as a tad insane so we upped the game of our own space agency and that's how i became the third American in space and the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times.
The Project Mercury recruitment program began with 508 of us which got whittled down to 110 and then 34 before the grueling series of physical and psychological tests to find the right seven people made of the right mental and physical stuff and most crucially stood exactly 5ft 11 inches which was the size you needed to be to fit into the spacecraft seats.
The first unmanned trial exploded seconds after it left the launchpad but the boffins assured us it wouldn't happen next time and i was considering buying some platform shoes to make me 6ft 2inches when i was selected for Mercury-Atlas 6, NASA's first crewed orbital flight.
We didn't explode this time and made it up to Space but during the first orbit the automatic-control system failed and then the telemetry indicated that the heat shield was loose but it held on until we splashed down in the Ocean almost 5 hours later.
I dabbled in politics afterwards and i did return to Space aged 77 to study the effects of space flight on older people and became the the oldest person to fly in space but i was only a small part in a list of people and dogs which culminated with mankind landing on the moon (or making a fake film of it depending upon your standpoint) where we played golf, drove around in a buggy, stuck a flag in the ground and then just kinda forgot all about it because by now it should be swarming with Americans waving flags and shouting 'awesome' while wearing Uncle Sam hats and eating hot-dogs.