John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth and whose space capsule went on display in Bermuda after the mission, has died at the age of 95.

The US Air Force veteran and astronaut, who also served as a senator for Ohio, made history in February 1962 when he flew three times around the planet — a mission that nearly wasn’t, after a computer error at the Bermuda station just before blast-off.

The island enjoyed a special place in the pioneer days of the space race between the US and USSR, courtesy of the Nasa tracking station on Cooper’s Island. The Atlas rocket booster blasted over Bermuda minutes after its launch from Florida — with fellow Mercury astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom talking him through the mission from the local base.

Mr Glenn was the fifth person in space when he made the journey in the Mercury capsule Friendship 7, which attained speeds of more than 17,000mph before returning to Earth in a splashdown 800 miles southeast of the island.

“We put it on display here, so the first place it went on show to the public was at City Hall,” JR Hendrickson, an official at the old Nasa tracking station on Cooper’s Island, told the Mid-Ocean News in 1997 as the facility prepared to close down. Mr Glenn died on Thursday, and is to be interred at Arlington National Cemetery.