LIFE slideshow: John Glenn, unpublished photos (The Newsroom)

No person alive has been more closely associated, for so long, with America's triumphs in space during the late '50s and early '60s than Ohio native John Glenn. Here, on the occasion of his 90th birthday (July 18), LIFE.com presents unpublished photos of the first American to orbit the earth; the decorated Marine Corps veteran (WWII and Korea); and the earnest, novice politician, taken by LIFE photographers during one of the most thrilling, inspiring, nerve-wracking eras in the nation's history: the Space Race.

Hank Walker/TIME & LIFE Pictures

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LIFE slideshow: NASA envisions alien worlds (The Newsroom)

For decades, NASA has delighted stargazers with pictures taken by astronauts, telescopes, and rovers across the galaxy -- photographic glimpses of real planets, moons, stars, and other heavenly bodies. When illustrators, meanwhile, stretch their imaginations -- giving shape and color to what, say, a sunrise on another world -- their work offers brilliant notions of what vistas beyond our tiny corner of space might look like. Captured by a camera or, as in this gallery, envisioned by artists, the far reaches of space continue to humble and amaze.

NASA/ JPL-Caltech

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LIFE slideshow: Never-seen photos of MLK & the Freedom Rides (The Newsroom)

It is the spring of 1961, and in the kitchen of a safe house in Montgomery, Alabama, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. looks tense, perhaps worried. As a volunteer bends his ear, the 32-year-old civil rights leader glances toward one of the 17 students hunkered down with him -- fresh-faced college kids who, moved by King's message of racial equality, have risked their very lives. The past two weeks have been harrowing for these young people -- the "Freedom Riders," they are called -- as they inch across the state on integrated buses, their numbers diminished at every stop in the face of arrests, bloody mob beatings, fire-bombings. There to capture the mood in the room as the group plans its next brave move -- a ride into Jackson, Mississippi -- is LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer, who covered the "Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom" four years earlier and had seen firsthand the kind of courage and determination King could inspire in his followers. Now, nearly 50 years after these Freedom Rides and in celebration of King's birthday, LIFE.com presents never-seen photos taken by Schutzer, tracking King and the nation-changing movement he led, from the monuments of Washington to the streets of the Deep South.

Paul Schutzer/TIME & LIFE Pictures

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LIFE slideshow: Before and after D-Day, in color (The Newsroom)

It's no mystery why images of shocking, unremitting violence spring to mind when one hears the deceptively simple term, "D-Day." We've all seen -- in black-and-white photos, movies, old news reels -- what happened on the beaches of Normandy as the Allies unleashed an historic assault against German defenses on June 6, 1944. But in rare, color photos taken before and after the invasion, LIFE photographer Frank Scherschel captured countless other, lesser-known scenes from the run-up to the onslaught and the heady weeks after: American troops training in small English towns; the French countryside, implausibly lush after the spectral landscape of the beachheads; the reception GIs enjoyed en route to the capital; the liberation of Paris. As presented here, in masterfully restored color on the anniversary of D-Day, Scherschel's pictures feel at-once profoundly familiar and somehow utterly, vividly new.

Frank Scherschel/TIME & LIFE Pictures

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LIFE slideshow: A Eulogy for Activationism (The Newsroom)

Do you want a 'real' experience to talk about when you get home from your vacation? Come and get yourself Activationized. This intriguing invitation, LIFE magazine informed readers in August 1948, was distributed that summer around Cape Cod's Provincetown to signal the beginning of a brand-new "cult" -- something known as Activationism. Here, LIFE.com offers a eulogy for and celebration of the short-lived, playful, and (evidently) quite exhilarating phenomenon.

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LIFE slideshow: Chris Hondros – In Memoriam (The Newsroom)

Chris Hondros, a New York-based, award-winning staff photographer for Getty Images, was killed in Misrata, Libya on April 20, 2011 -- along with fellow photographer Tim Hetherington -- during a battle between rebel fighters and backers of Col. Muammar Gaddafi. Hondros, who died of devastating brain injuries, covered most of the world's major conflicts since the late 1990s, including wars in Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Iraq. Here, in a gallery that will have to serve as both tribute and eulogy to a colleague who will be deeply missed, LIFE.com offers some of Chris' last photos -- a graphic record of a man doing a job he loved, and doing it exceptionally well, in circumstances that, too often, were absolutely hellish.

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Slideshow: Home sweet car (The Newsroom)

Seven families on the outskirts of Hefei, China, dismantle old cars as their livelihood during the day and live in renovated scrapped vehicles during the night.

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