_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [38]
Chancellor and I watched as Faith Seven came out of the sky, rolling steadily, the Oklahoma farm boy flying with a precision that controllers mumbled was tighter than the autopilot or computers had ever delivered.
Leroy Gordon Cooper plopped his Mercury spaceship into the sea a stone’s throw from his recovery ship.
John Chancellor shook his head in disbelief. After we were off the air, he stared at me in question. “He was flying a dead ship, why didn’t he die up there? Why didn’t he burn to death?” Chancellor shook his head again, disbelieving. “Gordo Cooper today made me proud of my old Kentucky home.”
I suppose Gordo made all us southerners proud, even Deke Slayton from southern Wisconsin. He told Gordo he’d done the best stick-and-rudder job ever. That he’d justified everything the astronauts had ever claimed, filled every promise that a hands-on pilot was the most needed system to fly in space.
“What a precision ending to Project Mercury, Gordo!” Deke smiled, grabbing his hand.
At the White House, President John Kennedy bids farewell to Gordo Cooper and his wife and daughters before he heads to Capitol Hill, where he would speak before a joint session of Congress. (NASA).
“We aim to please, Deke,” Gordo said with a grin as wide as Oklahoma and half of Texas, as the robot boys, those who say humans are not needed in space, walked away mumbling to themselves.
Gordo Cooper so impressed his country’s citizens they gave him a parade in the nation’s capital, where afterward he stopped by the White House to pick up a medal from President Kennedy before trotting off to the Capitol to speak before Congress. For the lawmakers, he repeated a spontaneous prayer he had made in space, and the magazine New Republic wrote: “His flight fell on the anniversary of Lindbergh’s lonely trip to Paris, who carried with him, you remember, a letter of introduction to the Ambassador. Major Cooper, it occurred to us, carried with him a letter of introduction to God.”
PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT
Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan (seated in the Lunar Rover), Harrison Schmitt, and Ron Evans in front of their Saturn V ready for launch. (NASA).
Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin plants the American flag on the moon. (NASA).
Apollo 17 astronauts at work at the Taurus-Littrow landing site. (NASA).
Harrison Schmitt takes geological samples from a house-sized lunar rock. Apollo 17’s Lunar Rover is parked at the rock’s opposite end. (NASA).
NASA presents the last man on the moon, Gene Cernan, ABC’s Hugh Downs, NBC’s Jay Barbree, AP’s Howard Benedict, and America’s first astronaut Alan Shepard with flags that went to the moon. (Barbree Collection).
“Light Echo” illuminates dust around Super Giant star V838 Monocerotis in this Hubble photograph. (NASA).
Space shuttle Columbia’s liftoff is reflected in one of the Cape’s lagoons. (Michael R. Brown/Florida Today).
April 6, 1997: space shuttle astronauts in earth orbit took this sunset photograph of the Comet Hale-Bopp. (NASA).
Lightning writes a warning over America’s spaceport in this magnificent photograph. (Michael R. Brown/Florida Today).
An Atlas rocket climbs into Cape Canaveral’s morning sun. (Michael R. Brown/Florida Today).
The International Space Station under orbital construction. (NASA).
Discovery rolls to its launch pad. (Michael R. Brown/Florida Today).
SEVEN
The Worst of Times
The early 1960s were not the best of times for an America on the verge of losing a President. The country’s baby boomers were off to college to protest a spreading military conflict in Vietnam, and many of us national reporters were waist deep in Dr. Martin Luther King’s equal-rights campaigns.
Meanwhile, NASA was building the hardware to reach the moon. The agency had decided it needed a new Manned Spacecraft Center and a new Mission Control, and movers and shakers across the country were taking dead aim at the prize. Every politician wanted the great economic