A true space cadet: Gordo Cooper
There's irony for you:
On the same day that a solo American pilot took a reusable private craft into space for its second trip within two weeks, securing the Ansari X Prize for Burt Rutan and his Tier One team, the last American pilot to orbit the Earth solo died.
Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr., known as "Gordo" to his colleagues, was the sixth and last of the Mercury astronauts who kicked off the first phase of the U.S. spaceflight program in the early 1960s. After launching on May 15, 1963, Gordo rode the capsule dubbed Faith 7 for 22 circuits of the globe during the next 34 hours. He later became the first person to repeat the orbital spaceflight experience when he and Charles "Pete" Conrad piloted Gemini 5 in August 1965.
Gordo — who was played by Dennis Quaid in Philip Kaufman's film The Right Stuff — had a reputation among the astronaut corps for being...well...different. He believed in UFOs, for example, to the degree that he spent the latter years of his life trying to convince people that a government conspiracy is covering up evidence that aliens have visited Earth. His book Leap of Faith, written in 2000, reiterated his claim, once made in an address before the United Nations, that he saw an alien spacecraft land at Edwards Air Force Base in 1957, and that his film of the event was confiscated by Federal agents. Cooper also said the government took away pictures he shot from Gemini 5 of the notorious Area 51 in Nevada.
(And yes, you're right, there were seven Mercury astronauts. Donald "Deke" Slayton, the seventh in line, was pulled from flight duty due to a heart murmur and never manned a Mercury capsule, instead becoming one of NASA's key Mission Control personnel. Slayton finally got his shot at space in 1975, when he participated in the joint Apollo-Soyuz docking mission.)
On the same day that a solo American pilot took a reusable private craft into space for its second trip within two weeks, securing the Ansari X Prize for Burt Rutan and his Tier One team, the last American pilot to orbit the Earth solo died.
Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr., known as "Gordo" to his colleagues, was the sixth and last of the Mercury astronauts who kicked off the first phase of the U.S. spaceflight program in the early 1960s. After launching on May 15, 1963, Gordo rode the capsule dubbed Faith 7 for 22 circuits of the globe during the next 34 hours. He later became the first person to repeat the orbital spaceflight experience when he and Charles "Pete" Conrad piloted Gemini 5 in August 1965.
Gordo — who was played by Dennis Quaid in Philip Kaufman's film The Right Stuff — had a reputation among the astronaut corps for being...well...different. He believed in UFOs, for example, to the degree that he spent the latter years of his life trying to convince people that a government conspiracy is covering up evidence that aliens have visited Earth. His book Leap of Faith, written in 2000, reiterated his claim, once made in an address before the United Nations, that he saw an alien spacecraft land at Edwards Air Force Base in 1957, and that his film of the event was confiscated by Federal agents. Cooper also said the government took away pictures he shot from Gemini 5 of the notorious Area 51 in Nevada.
(And yes, you're right, there were seven Mercury astronauts. Donald "Deke" Slayton, the seventh in line, was pulled from flight duty due to a heart murmur and never manned a Mercury capsule, instead becoming one of NASA's key Mission Control personnel. Slayton finally got his shot at space in 1975, when he participated in the joint Apollo-Soyuz docking mission.)
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