Gordon Cooper

Leroy Gordon 'Gordo' Cooper Jr. was born on March 6, 1927, in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and fell in love with flight as a boy, taking the controls of an aircraft while still young. After service in the Marine Corps at the close of World War II, he was commissioned in the U.S. Air Force in 1949 and flew F-84 and F-86 fighters with a squadron in West Germany. He earned an aerospace engineering degree in 1956, qualified as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, and accumulated more than 2,000 flight hours before NASA selected him in April 1959 as the youngest of the Mercury Seven.

Cooper flew the sixth and final Mercury mission, closing out the program in style. On May 15–16, 1963, he piloted Mercury-Atlas 9 — his capsule Faith 7 — through 22 orbits over roughly 34 hours, becoming the first American to spend an entire day in space, the first American to sleep in orbit, and the last American ever launched alone on an orbital flight. When an electrical failure late in the mission knocked out his automatic control system, Cooper flew a manual reentry by hand, lining up his attitude using star patterns and marks he had drawn on his window, and splashed down closer to the recovery ship than any Mercury pilot before him — a demonstration of piloting skill that answered doubts about whether astronauts were truly needed at the controls. In August 1965 he commanded Gemini 5, an eight-day, 120-orbit endurance flight with Pete Conrad that proved humans could survive long enough in space to reach the Moon and return, and made him the first person to make a second orbital spaceflight.

Cooper logged some 222 hours in space across his two flights. Passed over for a lunar landing crew and frustrated with his stalled prospects, he retired from NASA and the Air Force as a colonel in 1970. Off duty he indulged a lifelong passion for speed, racing cars and boats, and in retirement he pursued aviation ventures and spoke often — and controversially — about his belief in unidentified flying objects. As the youngest of the Original Seven and, for many years, one of its most visible members, he embodied the confident test-pilot spirit of the early space age. Gordon Cooper died at his California home on October 4, 2004, at the age of 77.