John Glenn calls historic flight "best day" of his life

COLUMBUS, Ohio Feb 20 (Reuters) - John Glenn, marking the 50th anniversary on Monday of becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, remembered the flight as the best day of his life.

Glenn, 90, told an audience in Columbus the flight was the result of "more than two years of training and working with a marvelous team."

"That is why the craft was called Friendship 7, because of the team," he said.

Glenn's groundbreaking flight on Feb. 20, 1962, put the United States into a heated space race with the Soviet Union, which had launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit 10 months earlier.

"It was the best day of my life," said Glenn, who went on to serve as Democratic senator from Ohio from 1974 to 1999.

"It seems more like two weeks than 50 years," he said of the flight, noting it had since been "a rare day" when someone had not asked him a question about space or his flight.

The anniversary has been marked by a series of celebratory events, and Glenn has taken the opportunity to speak out against funding cuts to the nation's space program.

Glenn returned to space in 1998, at age 77, on board the space shuttle Discovery as a research subject for experiments on aging sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

(Reporting by Jim Leckrone; Editing By Ellen Wulfhorst and Peter Cooney)