_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [37]
He smiled, nodded thanks to his hosts with another toast, and to the utter astonishment of the Gemini Nine astronauts, Cooper chowed down, eating the whole damn putrid and impossible mess.
Many had tried to rattle the cage of this man and just as many had failed. Prejudice and regional bias had kept Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr. grounded until the last Mercury launch, and on the morning of May 15, 1963, as the countdown approached liftoff, they had to awaken him for his long-delayed ride into Earth orbit. During an unplanned hold in the count, he fell asleep. Now he was ready to fly higher, farther, and longer than anyone before—a day-and-a-half mission where he would become the first human to sleep in space. As Slayton and his fellow Mercury astronauts knew he would, Cooper flew a technically perfect mission right on through his nineteenth orbit, thirty hours in space, setting a new American endurance record with every sweep around Earth.
Suddenly, there was a possible problem. Every flight controller in Mercury Control was alert and focused on a green light flashing on the wall-wide tracking map. “Holy crap,” Bob Harrington shouted. “He’s on the way back!” The light was the “.05g” signal, scheduled to shine when a Mercury capsule began descent into the atmosphere. CapCom made an immediate call to the spacecraft. “Hey, Gordo, this .05g signal light down here says you’re on reentry!”
“Like hell we are,” he told the ground.
Cooper settled back. He had been waiting for something like this. The flight until this point had been picture-perfect and after thirty hours in space, this glitch was the first signal that his Faith Seven was coming apart. It had been a good ship, but it had been stretched to its limits, and with just a couple of orbits to go, the glitch was certain to grow. It did. Within minutes, electrical surges knocked out the navigational instruments that kept Cooper informed of his location over Earth. Then, on orbit twenty-one, the automatic control system rolled over and died. That meant that Cooper would have to fire his retro-rockets manually.
Astronaut Gordo Cooper’s Mercury-Atlas heads into space. (NASA).
But to Gordo Cooper, trouble in flight was what they paid him the big bucks for. “Well,” he told the ground in his unmistakable twang, “it looks like we’ve got a few little washouts here. I’ve lost all electrical power. Carbon dioxide levels are above maximum limits, and cabin and suit temperatures are climbing. Looks like we’ll have to fly this thing ourselves. Other than that, things are fine.”
“Things are fine like hell,” Slayton laughed out loud. “If the carbon dioxide levels keep climbing Gordo will be dead, and the only reason why he can still talk to us is his radio is on independent battery. Let’s get him down, guys,” he yelled across Mercury Control.
Knowing Gordo, Deke had a feeling everything was going to be all right. He was happy as hell that on this endurance flight, man had proven more dependable than machine.
With just an hour to go in the flight, Mercury Control worked out procedures and maneuvers on a precise timetable, and John Glenn, stationed on a tracking ship south of Japan, radioed them up to Cooper.
“It’s been a real fine flight, Gordon,” Glenn told him. “Beautiful all the way.”
After twenty-two trips around Earth in zero-g (weightlessness), Cooper fired his three retro-rockets.
Glenn reported to Mercury Control: “He held it close, very tight. They were right on time on our marks here. They looked good, sounded good, and were good.” Even the great John Glenn was impressed.
Gordo Cooper was threading the needle for his return from space. He would tell me later that he flew like he had never flown before. All of the skills his pilot father had taught him, all that the books and great flyers could teach him in test-pilot training, all the thousands of hours he had spent wearing high-speed jets in the sky, had honed his abilities for this moment.
For Cooper’s mission I was on the air with the