In 1963 Gordon Cooper piloted the longest and last Mercury spaceflight, Mercury-Atlas 9.
69 Facts About Gordon Cooper
2.
Gordon Cooper became the first astronaut to make a second orbital flight when he flew as command pilot of Gemini 5 in 1965.
3.
Gordon Cooper liked to race cars and boats, and entered the $28,000 Salton City 500 miles boat race, and the Southwest Championship Drag Boat races in 1965, and the 1967 Orange Bowl Regatta with fire fighter Red Adair.
4.
Gordon Cooper retired from NASA and the Air Force with the rank of colonel in 1970.
5.
Gordon Cooper joined the Oklahoma National Guard, flying a Curtiss JN-4 biplane, despite never having formal military pilot training.
6.
Gordon Cooper graduated from college and law school, and became a state district judge.
7.
Gordon Cooper was called to active duty during World War II, and served in the Pacific theater in the Judge Advocate General's Corps.
8.
Gordon Cooper transferred to United States Air Force after it was formed in 1947, and was stationed at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii Territory.
9.
Gordon Cooper retired from the USAF with the rank of colonel in 1957.
10.
Gordon Cooper attended Jefferson Elementary School and Shawnee High School, where he was on the football and track teams.
11.
Gordon Cooper was active in the Boy Scouts of America, where he achieved its second highest rank, Life Scout.
12.
Gordon Cooper's parents owned a Command-Aire 3C3 biplane, and he learned to fly at a young age.
13.
Gordon Cooper was assigned to the Naval Academy Preparatory School as an alternate for an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, but the primary appointee was accepted, and Cooper was assigned to guard duty in Washington, DC Gordon Cooper was serving with the Presidential Honor Guard when he was discharged from the Marine Corps in 1946.
14.
Gordon Cooper started attending the University of Hawaii, and bought his own J-3 Cub.
15.
Gordon Cooper was active in flying, and would later become the only wife of a Mercury astronaut to have a private pilot license.
16.
At college, Gordon Cooper was active in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, which led to his being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Army in June 1949.
17.
Gordon Cooper was able to transfer his commission to the United States Air Force in September 1949.
18.
Gordon Cooper received flight training at Perrin Air Force Base, Texas and Williams Air Force Base, Arizona, in the T-6 Texan.
19.
On completion of his flight training in 1950, Gordon Cooper was posted to Landstuhl Air Base, West Germany, where he flew F-84 Thunderjets and F-86 Sabres for four years.
20.
Gordon Cooper became a flight commander of the 525th Fighter Bomber Squadron.
21.
Gordon Cooper returned to the United States in 1954, and studied for two years at the US Air Force Institute of Technology in Ohio.
22.
Gordon Cooper completed his Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering there on August 28,1956.
23.
Gordon Cooper aborted the takeoff, but the landing gear collapsed and the aircraft skidded erratically for 2,000 feet, and crashed at the end of the runway, bursting into flames.
24.
Gordon Cooper and Grissom escaped unscathed, although the aircraft was a total loss.
25.
Gordon Cooper flew the T-28, T-37, F-86, F-100 and F-104.
26.
In January 1959, Cooper received unexpected orders to report to Washington, DC There was no indication what it was about, but his commanding officer, Major General Marcus F Cooper recalled an announcement in the newspaper saying that a contract had been awarded to McDonnell Aircraft in St Louis, Missouri, to build a space capsule, and advised Cooper not to volunteer for astronaut training.
27.
On February 2,1959, Gordon Cooper attended a NASA briefing on Project Mercury and the part astronauts would play in it.
28.
Gordon Cooper went through the selection process with another 109 pilots, and was not surprised when he was accepted as the youngest of the first seven American astronauts.
29.
Gordon Cooper specialized in the Redstone rocket, which would be used for the first, sub-orbital spaceflights.
30.
Gordon Cooper chaired the Emergency Egress Committee, responsible for working out emergency launch pad escape procedures, and engaged Bo Randall to develop a personal survival knife for astronauts to carry.
31.
Gordon Cooper traveled to McGhee Tyson Air National Guard Base in Tennessee, where a friend let him fly higher-performance F-104B jets.
32.
Gordon Cooper held licenses with the Sports Car Club of America and the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing.
33.
Gordon Cooper served as capsule communicator for NASA's first sub-orbital spaceflight, by Alan Shepard in Mercury-Redstone 3, and Scott Carpenter's orbital flight on Mercury-Atlas 7, and was backup pilot for Wally Schirra in Mercury-Atlas 8.
34.
Gordon Cooper was designated for the next mission, Mercury-Atlas 9.
35.
Gordon Cooper achieved an altitude of 165.9 miles at apogee.
36.
Gordon Cooper was the first American astronaut to sleep, not only in orbit, but on the launch pad during a countdown.
37.
Gordon Cooper drew lines on the capsule window to help him check his orientation before firing the re-entry rockets.
38.
Gordon Cooper even attempted to enlist the support of President Kennedy.
39.
Nonetheless, Gordon Cooper practiced bringing his spacecraft to a predetermined location in space.
40.
The error would have been larger had Gordon Cooper not recognized the problem when the reentry gauge indicated that they were too high, and attempted to compensate by increasing the bank angle from 53 to 90 degrees to the left to increase the drag.
41.
Gordon Cooper became the first astronaut to make a second orbital flight.
42.
Gordon Cooper served as backup Command Pilot for Gemini 12, the last of the Gemini missions, with Gene Cernan as his pilot.
43.
In November 1964, Gordon Cooper entered the $28,000 Salton City 500 miles boat race with racehorse owner Ogden Phipps and racing car driver Chuck Daigh.
44.
Gordon Cooper competed in the Southwest Championship Drag Boat races at La Porte, Texas, later in 1965, and in the 1967 Orange Bowl Regatta with fire fighter Red Adair.
45.
Gordon Cooper was selected as backup commander for the May 1969 Apollo 10 mission.
46.
Slayton alleged that Gordon Cooper had developed a lax attitude towards training during the Gemini program; for the Gemini 5 mission, other astronauts had to coax him into the simulator.
47.
Slayton noted that Gordon Cooper had a slim chance of receiving the Apollo 13 command if he did an outstanding job as backup commander of Apollo 10, but Slayton felt that Gordon Cooper did not.
48.
Dismayed by his stalled astronaut career, Gordon Cooper retired from NASA and the USAF on July 31,1970, with the rank of colonel, having flown 222 hours in space.
49.
Gordon Cooper was president of GCR, which designed, tested and raced championship cars, conducted tire tests for race cars, and worked on installation of turbine engines on cars.
50.
Gordon Cooper served on the board of Teletest, which designed and installed advanced telemetry systems; Doubloon, which designed and built treasure hunting equipment; and Cosmos, which conducted archeological exploration projects.
51.
Gordon Cooper was a technical consultant for Canaveral International, Inc.
52.
Gordon Cooper claimed to have seen his first UFO while flying over West Germany in 1951, although he denied reports he had seen a UFO during his Mercury flight.
53.
On May 3,1957, when Gordon Cooper was at Edwards, he had a crew set up an Askania Cinetheodolite precision landing system on a dry lake bed.
54.
Gordon Cooper recalled that these men, who saw experimental aircraft on a regular basis as part of their job, were clearly unnerved.
55.
Gordon Cooper called a special Pentagon number to call to report such incidents, and was instructed to have their film developed, but to make no prints of it, and send it in to the Pentagon right away in a locked courier pouch.
56.
Gordon Cooper expected that there would be a follow-up investigation, since an aircraft of unknown origin had landed at a classified military installation, but never heard about the incident again.
57.
Gordon Cooper was never able to track down what happened to those photos, and assumed they ended up going to the Air Force's official UFO investigation, Project Blue Book, which was based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
58.
Gordon Cooper claimed until his death that the US government was indeed covering up information about UFOs.
59.
Gordon Cooper pointed out that there were hundreds of reports made by his fellow pilots, many coming from military jet pilots sent to respond to radar or visual sightings.
60.
Gordon Cooper died at age 77 from heart failure at his home in Ventura, California, on October 4,2004.
61.
On May 22,2012, another portion of Gordon Cooper's ashes was among those of 308 people included on the SpaceX COTS Demo Flight 2 that was bound for the International Space Station.
62.
Gordon Cooper was one of five Oklahoman astronauts inducted into the Oklahoma Aviation and Space Hall of Fame in 1980.
63.
Gordon Cooper was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1981, and the US Astronaut Hall of Fame on May 11,1990.
64.
Gordon Cooper was a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Astronautical Society, Scottish Rite and York Rite Masons, Shriners, the Royal Order of Jesters, the Rotary Club, Order of Daedalians, Confederate Air Force, Adventurers' Club of Los Angeles, and Boy Scouts of America.
65.
Gordon Cooper was a Master Mason, and was given the honorary 33rd Degree by the Scottish Rite Masonic body.
66.
Gordon Cooper worked closely with the production company, and every line uttered by Quaid was reportedly attributable to Gordon Cooper's recollection.
67.
The 2017 Discovery Channel docu-series Gordon Cooper's Treasure followed by Darrell Miklos as he searched through Gordon Cooper's files to discover the location of the suspected shipwrecks.
68.
Gordon Cooper appeared as himself in an episode of the television series CHiPs, and during the early 1980s made regular call-in appearances on chat shows hosted by David Letterman, Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas.
69.
Gordon Cooper was a major contributor to the book In the Shadow of the Moon, which offered his final published thoughts on his life and career.