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Journalism of Courage
Gordon Cooper, 77, one of the seven US astronauts who made the nation’s first manned spaceflights and became known as possessors of The Right Stuff, died on Monday at his home in Ventura, Calif. He died of natural causes, the Associated Press quoted the Ventura County medical examiner office as saying.
In the 1960s, with the nation determined to prevail in what was considered to be a space race with the Soviet Union, Cooper and fellow members of the Mercury programme were all national heroes, celebrated as exemplars of The Right Stuff in the book of that name by Tom Wolfe and in the subsequent movie.
Among Cooper’s signal achievements was serving as pilot of the Faith 7 spacecraft in a 22-orbit mission in May 1963. The mission that concluded the operational phase of Project Mercury, the programme that enabled the US to put humans into space .
During his Mercury flight, Cooper converted a technical problem into a personal triumph. Equipment to provide electricity for the re-entry control system failed to function. Cooper found it necessary to fly his capsule to an ocean landing without the assistance of the usual variety of automated devices. He landed the capsule himself, 7,000 yards from an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean. Later, Cooper served as the command pilot of a Gemini 5 mission, which lasted for eight days, beginning August 21, 1965. On that flight, he and fellow astronaut Charles Conrad set a record for time in space, when they covered 3,312,993 miles in 190 hours and 56 minutes.
Cooper, the first man to make two orbital flights, accumulated a total of 225 hours and 15 minutes in space.
Early on, it was reported that some officials were skeptical about Cooper’s fitness for the Mercury program. It was said that he was something of a complainer who had less than an ideal regard for the image the agency was trying to project. In later years, Cooper was outspoken in his views about the existence of extraterrestrial life and of unidentified flying objects.—LATWP
