by Jay Barbree
NASA knew the Mercury Seven could not fly all the orbital flights in the upcoming Gemini program. New pilots had to be recruited for the astronaut corps. The agency went back and hired Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles “Pete” Conrad, James Lovell, James McDivitt, Elliott See, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young. They had just missed the Mercury Seven cut, and with the exception of civilian Armstrong, they were all military. They were immediately dubbed the Gemini Nine.
NASA had also come to realize it needed someone to manage the astronauts’ office, to select flight crews, make assignments, plan and schedule training time, and be a link between the pilots and management. In short, be a mother hen to this elite corps.
The Mercury astronauts made three recommendations to NASA management: Deke Slayton, Deke Slayton, and Deke Slayton. NASA administrator Jim Webb smiled and turned a thumbs-up, and Deke became chief astronaut.
Those who were there said it was like turning on a switch. Deke’s pride was back. The first rule he made was there would be no copilots in space. No test pilot could stomach being called a copilot, and Deke laughed and proclaimed, “Our Gemini crew members will be made up of a command pilot and a pilot.”
Astronaut Wally Schirra is slipped into his Mercury spacecraft Sigma Seven for his textbook flight. (NASA).
Some outsiders judged the appointment as a pacifier for a crestfallen astronaut, but that attitude had a short life. Deke took absolute charge. In short order his office was the power to be reckoned with. The new levels of respect carried over to the entire astronaut team. Everybody stepped back when it came to astronaut selection for flights. Deke carried the ball, and on October 3, 1962, while the World Series was being played, an Atlas rocket boosted Wally Schirra and his Sigma Seven into orbit. Wally proved his skills, as Deke knew he would. He stayed up for six orbits—nine hours. He had been launched with the same fuel quantity as Glenn and Carpenter, but he conserved fuel in a way that amazed Mercury Control. In the process he went through his scientific and engineering checklist with an efficiency that would have turned a robot green with envy.
It was what NASA watchers had been waiting for, a perfect flight. Sigma Seven splashed down less than four miles from the main recovery carrier near Midway Island in the Pacific. One broadcaster dubbed it “the flight of the Mongoose.”
When the dust had settled in the wake of Schirra’s mission, the new Gemini Nine test pilots had been given the title of astronaut. The new group would join the Mercury Seven in flying the Gemini maneuverable spaceships.
Deke Slayton now had fifteen astronauts under his wing. He set the newcomers up for indoctrination and training and figured the more they saw of the remaining days of Project Mercury, the better prepared they’d be for flying the heavier, larger advanced Gemini—a spaceship that could not only maneuver, but could change its orbit, change its altitude, and rendezvous and dock with other ships, a spaceship that would define and test the procedures needed for Apollo to reach the moon.
Slayton also knew something most reporters didn’t. America was going to the moon for national prestige—nothing else. “If the Russians weren’t kicking our ass, Barbree,” he told me, “there would be no Project Apollo.”
Astronaut Gordo Cooper whips himself into shape for his marathon flight by jogging in the shadow of the Saturn 1B rocket pad. (NASA).
The chief astronaut drew up a flight plan that would put Mercury in a category with Russia’s ships in time spent in space. No three-or-six-orbit flight for the fourth and final orbiting Mercury. This would be a shot of twenty-two orbits—a day and a half spent circling Earth. And he would need a “hot dog” to handle such a tough assignment. He would need the best stick-and-rudder man in the air force. He would need Leroy Gordon “Gordo” Cooper, a kick-ass barnyard of a pilot who knew only one way: “Git ’er done.”
Operations director Walt Williams stopped by Deke’s office and said, “Look, I know besides yourself, Gordo Cooper is the only Mercury guy who hasn’t flown. But maybe it would be a good idea to consider moving Al Shepard into this last Mercury flight.” Then Williams saw the chief astronaut’s face. He swallowed hard. “Of course, it’s your call, Deke.”
Deke began to simmer and could barely nod a good-bye when Williams left. He wasn’t fooled for a second. The issue at hand was that Gordon Cooper was too much of a maverick for some in the space-agency hierarchy. His hotshot jet flying and his tendency to bend the rules did not sit well with them. Deke judged Gordo as nothing less than a terrific pilot. He had come up through the ranks—paying his dues all along the way, flying everything from J–3 cubs to F–106s, and he belonged at the stick of the last Mercury. If anyone knew how it felt to have an earned flight yanked from under his feet, it sure as hell was Deke Slayton. He wasn’t about to stand by and see Gordo get the shaft.
And there was something else. There were the elitists who disapproved of Gordo’s Oklahoma twang. “He’s nothing but a redneck,” laughed some members of the press and NASA’s public affairs office. To them the fact that Leroy Gordon “Gordo” Cooper, Jr. was one of the best pilots on earth was irrelevant. They just didn’t want “trailer park trash” representing NASA.
Gordo Cooper met this problem as he did all of his problems: head on. He invited the NASA public affairs officer leading the attack on his heritage outside and simply assured him he would kick his condescending ass. The man’s only defense was to “hide behind the rules and laws drafted by lesser men” and then to run. Scared out of his wits, the NASA mouthpiece went to Deke only to be told by the chief astronaut, “If Gordo needs any help kicking your ass, he can count on me.”
That was the end of it. The flight was Gordo’s.
Two days before Cooper’s scheduled liftoff, the launch team was on an around-the-clock readiness schedule with his Atlas and spacecraft, and our NBC crews were setting up our broadcast trailers for the launch. Everyone was hard at work when suddenly we heard a tremendous BOOM rip through the launch-pad complex. Nobody saw flames. Everyone was certain there had been an explosion. But there was no smoke rising, no buildings collapsing…
Then we saw it. Cooper’s jet howled away from the Cape in a dizzying climb after laying down a supersonic thunderbolt across the launch center. It was his friendly way of saying, “Morning, everybody!”
His thunderous arrival was the art of “buzzing,” a tradition that dated back to the Wright brothers, and was hardly new to fighter pilots of Gordo Cooper’s skills. It was a ceremonial rite for the astronauts now, as it had been before they’d ever considered going into space.
Never-smile Walt Williams was standing in his office when Gordo and his F–102 shot by at window level. The sonic boom shook the building, made him drop the papers he was holding and sent his hands to stop his heart from leaping out of his throat. He spun around cursing and stomped into the outer office, where Alan Shepard sat.
“Does you spacesuit still fit you?” he bellowed.
“What?”
“Simple question, Shepard,” he shouted. “Does your spacesuit fit?”
Shepard played dumb. Again. “Why?”
“Because I want to know if you’re ready to step in for ‘hotdog,’ that’s why!”
Shepard made a valiant effort to suppress howling laughter. After all, he was hardly innocent of such buzzing greetings himself; he’d shaken more than his share of windows on Cape Canaveral. But he took the diplomatic route. He managed to calm down the irate, foot-stomping operations director and got him to join him and Deke at Henri’s bar that evening.
“We’ll talk about it then,” Shepard assured Williams, before walking outside and grabbing his stomach for his own belly laugh.
That evening, Shepard and Slayton pumped a couple of drinks in Williams and managed a smile from the much-too-serious Mercury boss.
The Mercury Seven stood solid. They told the operations director flatly that Cooper was flying the mission, and Shepard added with a tone not to be challenged, “Gordo has earned that seat, and there’s not a pilot amon
g us who’d step in and take it away. Certainly not me.”
End of discussion.
As Project Mercury’s final launch approached, the Gemini Nine judged they should show reverence and respect for the Mercury trailblazers. They planned an elaborate dinner for the Seven, and Henri Landwirth lent his motel’s kitchen to the likes of Pete Conrad, Gene Cernan, Jim Lovell, and Neil Armstrong. Then he helped the gang of nine with their dastardly deed.
They advertised the Mercury Seven’s dinner as a magnificent meal of breaded veal, potatoes au gratin, tropical salads, and the finest imported wines.
Well, at least they made good on their promise of the finest of imported wines, and the Mercury astronauts mumbled their surprise and thanks to the new group. They immediately began the required toasting and bestowing of good wishes and fortune on one another. It was comradeship at its finest, a measure of friendship to warm hearts and minds. Then sixteen astronauts sat down to enjoy the gastronomical repast.
The lavish feast was served by waiters using silver trays from Henri Landwirth’s own collection. The Gemini group had prepared a sumptuous feast of fried breaded cardboard likened to veal; putrid, au rotten potatoes blackened from their own decomposition; and a bellied-up salad that had been steaming in the hot, tropical sun all day. Silence descended.
Gordo Cooper sat quietly, telling himself, “This ain’t my first rodeo.” He had, indeed, been here before. His own reputation at air bases around the world had been built on such pranks and moments. He simply refused to admit to a truly classic “gotcha!”
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 great John Chancellor. Over and over we said we were witnessing an almost impossible flying job.
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 windfall for his or her constituents. But Vice President Lyndon Johnson had the inside track, and he rode “hell-bent-for-leather” through the political thickets to lock up a site south of Houston. The name of the horse he was riding was “Chairman of President Kennedy’s Space Advisory Committee.” He used this White House portfolio for a political cavalry charge that would have made Jeb Stuart proud.