Nation: Great Gordo

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For 29½ hours, the flight was flawless. Streaking through space at 17,157 m.p.h.. Air Force Major Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. ate, slept, exchanged banter with ground-bound fellow astronauts, coolly conducted scientific experiments. But now there was trouble. Just as Cooper prepared for the searing plunge through the earth’s atmosphere, his autopilot system went out.

The world tensed. Scattered across the globe, 28 ships and 172 aircraft deployed to pick Cooper up—if he got back. From the command ship Coastal Sentry, 275 miles south of Japan, Astronaut John Glenn gave Cooper new re-entry instructions. Cooper was unruffled. Said he wryly: “I’m looking for lots of experience on this flight.” Replied Glenn, the first American to make an orbital flight: “You’re going to get it.”

He got it. After being strapped in the 6-ft.-wide Faith 7 for nearly a day and a half, he had to take over when the best equipment that the best of science could provide failed. He had to respond with incredible precision to directions from earth; he had to show a kind of skill and nerve and calm that no man has ever had to demonstrate. While people around the world listened with deep anxiety, Major Cooper seemed cooler than any man on earth. Finally, he piloted his craft into the atmosphere, and his communications blacked out. After four minutes of excruciating silence from space, he was sighted by radar—and moments later, a roar of triumph came from sailors aboard the carrier Kearsarge, 115 miles east-southeast of Midway. Four miles off the port bow, Cooper’s orange and white chute floated down through a brilliant blue sky. He was safe—he had done what his equipment could not do.

The Pilot. What kind of man did it take to do what Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. did? Of the original seven U.S. astronauts, “Gordo” Cooper was the youngest (36), slightest (5 ft. 9 in., 147 Ibs.), quietest, least known—and, in the opinion of many, the least likely to win the world’s acclaim for a marvel of skill and courage.

Cooper was the sixth astronaut to enter space—and some officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been reluctant to give him his chance. They tabbed Cooper as something of a complainer, as unpredictable, and as indifferent to building the “public image” demanded of astronauts. Hardly had he entered the Mercury program four years ago when Cooper protested about the time required away from his family. He com plained, too, about the astronauts’ lack of opportunity to fly jets—and “incidentally” to collect flight pay. He shied away from the public togetherness of the other astronauts and their wives, leading one wife to sputter: “Why, he’s . . . he’s . . . he’s not an astronaut!”

More than any other astronaut, Cooper displayed his bitterness at being passed over on earlier space flights. Yet when NASA doctors grounded Astronaut Donald Slayton because of a heart flutter, Cooper threatened to quit the program. After the fifth U.S. man-in-space flight, a superb six-orbit job by Wally Schirra, there were reports that last week’s flight would be flown by Alan Shepard. Schirra, a close friend of Cooper’s, put an end to that: he threatened to raise a public ruckus if Cooper were bypassed.

Cooper was in other ways disconcerting. He has a passion for fast cars, drives his 1963 Sting Ray Chevrolet at speeds upward of 100 m.p.h. His humor is unpredictable. Before the first Mercury flight, by Shepard, Cooper was asked to demonstrate to television cameramen how the astronaut would ride to the launch pad in a van and enter a gantry elevator for the space shot. Cooper donned a silver space suit, walked to the elevator entrance—and stopped in mock horror. As cameras whirred, he grabbed a girder and screamed: “No! I don’t wanna go! I won’t go!” The TV men were amused, but not the NASA officials. Again, during Gus Grissom’s suborbital flight. Cooper, who had been flying a chase jet, buzzed the Cape and momentarily disrupted communications. He was severely reprimanded, and it was that sort of stunt that a worried Mercury official had in mind when he said before last week’s flight: “He’s enough of a daredevil to pull some stunt up there we don’t know about.”

Solo at Sixteen. But Cooper’s doubters missed a central point. Aimless as he may sometimes seem on earth, he is a man with a mission—”to go a little bit higher and a little bit faster.” Explains a close friend: “All Gordon Cooper is, is a pilot. He’s a good one and a smart one, and that’s all he wants to be.”

Cooper was all but born in a pilot’s seat. A native of Oklahoma, his father was a lawyer, a county judge from Shawnee—and an amateur pilot. Gordo sat in his father’s lap during voyages in an old Command-Aire biplane, took the stick himself by the time he was six. As a teenager, he worked odd jobs around the Shawnee airport to pay for lessons in a J-3 Piper Cub trainer. He was inspired, in part, by stories his father told about two famed acquaintances, Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post. Gordo soloed “officially,” he now recalls with a grin, at 16.

Gordon Cooper Sr. (who died in 1960) became a legal officer in the Air Force during World War II, liked it so well that he made it a career. Gordo enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school graduation, served in the presidential honor guard in Washington, then joined his parents in their home at Honolulu’s Hickam Air Force Base. Attending the University of Hawaii, he met a pert drum majorette named Trudy Olson. Among Trudy’s attractions: she owned a third interest in a Piper Cub and taught flying. They were married in 1947; and today they fly in their own Beechcraft Bonanza (Cooper is the only plane owner among the astronauts). Their daughters. Cam, 14, and Jan, 13, sometimes take a supervised turn at the controls.

With that background, Cooper could not resist the temptation to trade his college R.O.T.C. commission for an Air Force lieutenant’s bar in 1949. He flew F-84s and F-86s with a fighter-bomber group in Munich for four years, earned an aeronautical engineering degree at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, qualified for the rugged test-pilot duty at the pioneering Edwards Air Force Base in California—home of the world’s highest, fastest jet, the X-15. A few years before his selection as an astronaut, Cooper took a friendly flight with another future Mercury spaceman, Gus Grissom. The two crashed a T-33 trainer off the end of a runway at Denver’s Lowry Air Force Base in 1956.

Dry Run. Having spent much of his lifetime in the air, Cooper therefore had few fears about space flight. During his Mercury training period, medics were somewhat upset by his habit of falling asleep during the lengthy physical checks. And he was equally unflappable last Tuesday morning when he crawled into his capsule atop an Atlas missile at Canaveral’s Pad 14 and waited six hours on his contour couch—for a launch that did not come that day. The countdown was stalled for more than two hours, while some of the world’s most brilliant electronics and computer experts cursed at the refusal of a simple, 275-h.p. diesel engine to start so that the servicing gantry could be rolled away from the poised missile. Although the diesel finally was repaired, the launch was scrubbed at T-minus-13 because of trouble with a vital tracking radar at Bermuda. Cooper could only have been disappointed by the delay, but as he walked slowly away from the missile, he summoned up a grin. “I was,” he said, “just getting to the real fun part.”

Next morning Cooper was back in his Faith 7 capsule. As he lay on his back, the ten-story-high launch assembly swayed gently. The thin skin of the Atlas popped and clinked with expansion and contraction. Vapor whistled with pitch-pipe tones through the liquid oxygen release valve. Gyros purred—and, to the astonishment of control-center monitors, Cooper’s respiration rate dropped to twelve per minute. Astronaut Cooper apparently was taking a catnap.

The countdown went almost perfectly. At 8:04 a.m. (E.S.T.), just four minutes past schedule, the three main engines of Cooper’s silvery Atlas thundered to life with lightning-white flame. There was never any doubt about the success of the launching, and as he soared into space, Gordon Cooper, the most reticent of the astronauts, was exultant. “Boy, this is beautiful,” he radioed. “Boy oh boy. It looks that pretty. Boy oh boy.” On the ground. Cape Communicator Schirra was also elated. “You got a real sweet trajectory, Gordo,” he advised. “You’re right smack dab in the middle of the plot.” Little more could be said: Cooper’s velocity, programmed at an ideal of 25,715 ft. per second, was 25,716; his heading was just .0002 of a degree from perfect.

The flight went so well that Cooper, after his initial exhilaration, seemed almost bored. On his second orbit, while over the Pacific between Hawaii and Cali fornia, he dozed for a few moments. Then, on his ninth orbit, after nearly 14 hours in space, his program called for him to try to sleep. Advised Communicator Glenn: “I’m going to tell them [all other communicators] to go away and leave you alone now.” Cooper pulled a curtain across his capsule window, allowed his craft to speed untended through outer space. In the silence of such flight, the weightless astronaut has no sensation of movement even when falling upside down. Drowsy and drifting. Cooper fell easily asleep.

Two orbits later, medics on the ground, following Cooper’s heart rate by telemetered data, saw it surge momentarily from 60 to 100—and figured he was having some sort of exciting dreams. Cooper at first denied it, but on landing confirmed that he had dreamed, even though he could not remember the plot. He awoke after 7½ hours of sleep, before a ground-triggered signal in his headset would have roused him. After an earlier snooze in flight, he awoke to find his weightless arms extended, as had some of the Soviet cosmonauts. From then on, Cooper tucked his hands under his restraining shoulder straps before sleeping to keep from moving any control switches accidentally.

The Guinea Pig. Cooper’s mental and physical reactions were, of course, focal to the flight—and to the future of man in space. During his voyage, he conducted—or served as the guinea pig for—a variety of experiments. While previous astronauts used rectal thermometers. Cooper had a thermometer attached inside his helmet, opened his visor several times to pop it in his mouth. He pressed a button on his control panel to inflate a cuff on his arm and record his blood pressure just before and after pulling on a rubber exerciser. He tried some dehydrated food, including roast beef, which he squeezed out of small plastic bags after adding water through a nozzle. He experienced some difficulty, however, in both eating and drinking.

Doctors were particularly interested in urine checks, since Russian physicians had reported significant accumulations of calcium in the urine of their space travelers. This led to the theory that prolonged space flight might adversely affect human bones. Urine samples were collected in a “motorman’s pal” attached to the lining of Cooper’s space suit. His special preflight low-residue diet retarded defecation.

Sensors attached to Cooper’s chest monitored his respiration rate; others permitted electrocardiograph readings. These measurements were telemetered to earth.

Physicians at Cape Canaveral reported that all of the astronaut’s physiological functions were normal throughout his flight. Under the acceleration of liftoff, his pulse rose high to 150.

Elusive Light. Other experiments were specifically designed to furnish information for the future two-man Gemini or bital project and the later Apollo mission to the moon. To check visual sighting in space—vital to any in-flight rendezvous between spacecraft—Cooper ejected a 10-lb., 5¾-in. sphere carrying two bright flashing lights. Then, heading toward darkness near Africa on his third orbit, he failed to spot the sphere until he was near Hawaii on his fourth. “All of a sudden I saw it rising up from below me,” he reported. “I could see it shining before I could see it flash, so apparently it had some light reflected off of it.” When the sphere seemed about 18 miles away. Cooper said, it had the brightness of “a second-magnitude star.” In another visual measurement test. Cooper tried to release a tethered balloon; the effort was unsuccessful because an explosive charge failed to fire and deploy the gear.

Trying to find out if earth lights can give navigation fixes to moon-bound spacecraft, Cooper successfully sighted a 3,000,000-candlepower ground light at Bloemfontein, South Africa. Surprisingly, he saw the normal lights of a nearby village before locating the bright one. Cooper took photometer readings of stars to measure the extent to which his window attenuates light. He snapped numerous photographs with special cameras to study the halolike zodiacal light, a mysterious night airglow layer, and the horizon itself. Scientists hope that the horizon may also provide a sharp enough line for navigational fixes from space vehicles.

Cooper’s capsule carried Geiger counters to measure the radiation it encountered throughout its flight. The experts were most interested in learning whether an artificial belt, created over eastern South America and the South Atlantic by a high-altitude U.S. nuclear explosion last summer, was decaying as anticipated. Cooper wore four film patches beneath his pressure suit to record radiation reaching his body. Scientists estimated that he was exposed to less radiation than that of a normal chest X ray.

In other tests. Cooper deployed a 28-ft. antenna to check its high-frequency transmitting ability from both a horizontal and, by rolling his capsule 90°, a vertical plane. He shut off the cabin cooling system for a time, found that his pressure-suit cooling system kept him at about a comfortable 65°. In a long space flight, power could be saved by using, at least part of the time, the suit cooling alone. At one point, a gadget carrying condensed air out of his suit broke down, and Cooper began sweating profusely. Complained he: “I’m having a continuing battle with the plumbing.” To get comfortable, he had to change his suit cooling control periodically.

Engineers later said that they were satisfied with television pictures transmitted to earth from a 10-lb. camera that Cooper could direct either at himself or out of his window. In the process of converting these signals for rebroadcast on regular TV channels, however, the pictures lost their clarity—and looked to the layman like mush. In one lighthearted moment, he held in front of the camera a small hand-lettered sign that read: “Go 22.”

Throughout his flight, Astronaut Cooper performed magnificently. Where both John Glenn and Scott Carpenter had yielded to a pilot’s instinct to maneuver their capsules manually, thereby using up precious hydrogen-peroxide fuel, Cooper kept hands off as much as possible. He came up to his final orbit with 70% of the fuel for his manual control system still unused. Early in the flight. Communicator Alan Shepard had kidded Cooper: “You’re getting kind of chinchy on using this fuel up there.” And Cooper managed his own oxygen supply so well that Shepard told him laughingly: “You can stop holding your breath any time and use some oxygen if you like.”

“Hello, Africa.” For most of the time that Cooper whirled through space, sliding from night into day and day into night every 45 minutes, his capsule behaved equally well. It afforded him time for such celestial ceremonies as receiving a “good luck and Godspeed” message from Air Force Secretary Eugene Zuckert and Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay. Cooper sent a space greeting to representatives of some 30 African nations meeting in Addis Ababa: “Hello, Africa. This is Astronaut Gordon Cooper speaking from Faith 7. I am right now over 100 miles above Africa just passing Zanzibar. Just a few minutes ago, I passed Addis Ababa. I want to wish you success to your leaders there. Good luck to all of you in Africa.” Cooper flew seven times over Red China, the first U.S. astronaut to pass above that hostile land. He saw smoke curling from chimneys in Tibet, the glow of lights in Perth, Australia, even spotted his present home town of Clear Lake, Texas, near Houston’s new Manned Spacecraft Center. In all. Cooper sped over more than 100 nations. To recover him promptly if he came down on foreign soil, the U.S. State Department got advance promises from some 80 embassies and 17 consulates that they would permit U.S. rescue teams to seek him. Had he landed in Red China, the U.S. was prepared to demand, through an Iron Curtain intermediary, probably Poland, his immediate release.

Well into Cooper’s second day of flight, Mercury Control Announcer John (“Shorty”) Powers proudly said: “The spacecraft is still performing in almost unbelievable fashion.” And then came the crisis. On his 19th orbit, while out of radio contact over the Western Pacific, Cooper reached forward, threw a switch to dim his panel lights—and saw a small indicator glow green.

That light was labeled “.05G”—indicating that the gravity pull on Cooper’s capsule had built up to five one-hundredths of ground-level gravity force. The light should have blinked on only after Cooper’s three retrorockets had been fired, nudging the capsule out of orbit. If working properly, the light would also mean that the autopilot system was set to start the capsule rolling slowly. The roll, imparting a corkscrew motion as the capsule bores into the atmosphere, would produce a smoother reentry.

Had Cooper somehow slipped out of orbit? No. The Hawaii tracking station assured him that his position was proper. Was the light then merely faulty? Or had the autopilot re-entry circuit been triggered out of its normal sequence? On his 20th orbit, he was advised to switch to autopilot—and the capsule began to roll. He then knew that once he reached the .05G level on reentry, his autopilot would take over.

But for proper flight, there were other functions for the autopilot to perform before reaching this re-entry positioning. And since each stage was automatically linked in sequence with the others, he now knew that the earlier functions had been skipped, would not be performed by the autopilot. These included the precise positioning of his capsule for the firing of his retrorockets, the triggering of those rockets and the jettisoning of his retro-package. These functions would have to be controlled by hand.

Neither Cooper nor the Mercury controllers at Canaveral were terribly worried about this prospect. Scott Carpenter, although overshooting his landing target by some 250 miles, had achieved re-entry with the same maneuvers. Cooper himself had often practiced them on a ground simulator.

The Dead Inverters. But the Canaveral experts were taking no chances. Rushing to a training capsule in Hangar S, they set up the trouble that Cooper was experiencing on a simulator, assured themselves that their diagnosis was right.

Everyone breathed a bit easier—but not for long. Over Zanzibar on his 22nd orbit, panel lights indicated that one of Cooper’s three inverters had gone dead. He tried to start a second, but could not.

The inverters convert battery power to alternating current, are needed to operate the autopilot system. Cooper’s sole remaining inverter was needed to power cabin cooling gear on reentry. Now Cooper would have no automatic aids at all in bringing his capsule down. No inverters had ever failed on a Mercury flight before; on the possibility that the third inverter might also go, engineers dug feverishly into their capsule simulator, checked out a plan to get Cooper down on the capsule’s battery power if necessary. “We would have found some way to fire the retros.” said Capsule Designer John Yardley later, “if it meant telling him what wires to twist together.”

It was now up to Cooper—with some dramatic help from the calm, crisp voice of John Glenn on the Coastal Sentry. Cooper and Glenn ran swiftly, surely, down a check list of the operations Cooper must perform for reentry. Cooper skillfully steadied his craft by a manual control stick with his right hand, prepared to punch the retrofire button with his left.

Like a rifleman with a crosshair sight, he lined up a horizontal mark on his window with the horizon, which brought the narrow neck of his capsule pointing down 34°. He lined up a vertical mark with predetermined stars to provide proper heading. Asked Glenn: “How does the attitude check?” Replied Cooper: “Right on the old kazoo.”* “Thataway boy. O.K. on procedures, Gordo. I’ll give you a one-minute mark before retrofire, and then I’ll give you a ten-second countdown to what would normally be your sequence time.”

“Good Show.” The pair counted in unison, and Cooper pushed his button. Because of his electrical problems, he got no light signals that his retrorockets had fired. But he could feel them. “Roger, you’re green,” said Glenn, indicating that telemetry signals on the Coastal Sentry had confirmed the firing. “How is your attitude, Gordo?” “Real great.” “Good show. boy. Looks like you came out right on the money, on time.”

As Faith 7 blasted into the atmosphere, friction set up a curtain of ionization that knocked out communications. While in the ionized layer, Cooper fired small thrusters to make the capsule roll slowly. Once out of the layer, he triggered his drogue parachute by hand at 40,000 ft. His main chute blossomed at 10,000—and he scored his bull’s-eye landing off the Kearsarge. Capsule engineers, who constantly complain that astronauts would fly much better if they would just sit back and let their autopilots do the work, ruefully admitted that Cooper proved them wrong. Said an admiring Yardley: “Cooper was as good as any autopilot we ever had.”

In physical checks on the Kearsarge, Gordon Cooper displayed a momentary dizziness upon stepping out onto the deck after 34 hours and 20 minutes of weightless flight through 22 orbits—a space trip surpassed only by the 64-and 48-orbit tandem missions of Soviet Cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich last August. He had lost 7 Ibs. since his Canaveral liftoff, and in his dehydrated state, he gulped down four glasses of pineapple juice and six glasses of milk.

Then Cooper did something he does almost as naturally as he flies. He slept for 9½ hours, awoke refreshed. He was placed on a tiltboard, and his pulse and blood pressure were checked in both horizontal and vertical positions. The doctors found that these measurements were normal. With that good news, he was ready to meet his wife and daughters in Hawaii, then to fly to Washington this week for a hero’s welcome by President Kennedy and an admiring nation.

* This transmission touched off a disagreement among listeners. Some insisted that the word was “bazoo,” some thought it was “gazola,” and some heard it as “kazoo.” The dispute was not likely to hold up the U.S. space program.