US celebrates 50 years of first space flight

Fifty years after John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, Nasa no longer has the ability to fly astronauts in space, a decision Glenn lays squarely on the shoulders of the Bush administration.

Glenn's groundbreaking flight on February 20, 1962, put the US into a heated space race with the Soviet Union, which had launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit 10 months earlier. The retirement of the shuttles last year left US dependent on its former Cold War foe to get astronauts to and from the jointly owned International Space Station, which flies about 385 km above planet.

"I regret that that is the way things have developed," Glenn told a crowd of current and former Nasa employees and guests at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Saturday night, part of a series of celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of his flight.

"We spent over $100 billion dollars putting the space station up there. It's too bad in the previous administration the decision was made to end the shuttle, so now we have to go somewhere else to even get up to our station," said Glenn, who served as a Democratic senator from Ohio between 1975 to 1999.

US grounded its aging shuttles last year due to high operating costs and to free up funds for a new generation of spacecraft.