Rick Neale

FLORIDA TODAY

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — Though the American public knew John Glenn as one of NASA’s original seven Mercury astronauts and later an Ohio senator, he prided himself in being a colonel and fighter pilot with the U.S. Marines, recalled Robert Cabana, Kennedy Space Center director.

“You just can’t describe what a fine gentleman he was and what a passion he had for America’s space program, and for flying. And that’s who John Glenn was,” Cabana said Friday during a memorial ceremony for the spaceflight pioneer.

“He was just a truly, truly fine gentleman. And he is going to be greatly, greatly missed,” he said.

Cabana spoke during a brief ceremony honoring Glenn — the first American to orbit the Earth — at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. The event took place at an outdoor stage beneath a white Mount Rushmore-esque sculpture depicting the Mercury 7.

Officials displayed a flowered wreath bearing the message "Our American Hero: Forever Remembered" alongside Glenn's NASA portrait from the 1998 STS-95 Discovery space shuttle mission, where he served as payload specialist and became the oldest human in space at age 77.

The ceremony took place outside the visitor complex's Heroes and Legends building, which opened last month and houses the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame. Glenn was one of the hall's inaugural 1990 inductees. Artifacts inside the building include Glenn's orbital map, his pilot helmet and flight gloves, and an array of mission control consoles from his Friendship 7 flight on Feb. 20, 1962.

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Outside stands a replica of the silver Mercury-Atlas 6 "Stargazer" rocket that flew Glenn into space. A photo at its base shows Glenn and President John F. Kennedy riding in a convertible during a parade in Cocoa Beach after his historic spaceflight.

Shuttle astronaut Jon McBride, who piloted the Challenger STS-41G mission in 1984, said he idolized Glenn while he was growing up in West Virginia. He labeled the legendary astronaut "a prince of our universe."

After the Challenger explosion, McBride went to Washington, D.C., as NASA's assistant administrator for congressional relations from 1987-89. Glenn was then one of Ohio's U.S. senators.

"(NASA Director James) Fletcher and I would walk the halls just about every day campaigning for NASA -- getting our brains beat out occasionally by folks who weren't big fans of the space program," McBride told the memorial-service crowd.

"At the end of the day, we would say, 'Let's go by and visit with John.’ Pump us up, so we could go home that night feeling a little bit better about ourselves and about our space program," McBride said.

"So it goes back a long ways. And there's not a man on this earth that I admired much more than John Glenn. He was a special guy. We're going to miss him. But he lived 95 years. Healthy, wealthy and wise. He had Annie with him by his side for 74 of those years. What more could a guy ask for?” he asked.

“So God bless you, John Glenn.”

Contact Neale at 321-242-3638, rneale@floridatoday.com or follow @RickNeale1 on Twitter