He was the youngest of the group. Each of the astronauts was assigned a special task, and Cooper was supposed to take care of the Redstone rocket, which had to be adapted to the Mercury spacecraft. He was also busy designing a utility knife that the astronauts could use in the event of an emergency landing or ditching.
On the Mercury-Atlas 6 and Mercury-Atlas 7 flights, Cooper worked as a liaison spokesman (Capcom) in flight management. On June 27, 1962, he was nominated as a replacement pilot for the next flight, Mercury-Atlas 8 with Walter Schirra. This flight took place on October 3, 1962.
Gordon Cooper, the only one of the seven astronauts still awaiting deployment (Deke Slayton was no longer fit to fly due to heart problems), was nominated to pilot the final Mercury spacecraft on November 13, 1962. While five of his colleagues moved on to new tasks in the area of Gemini and Apollo, Gordon Cooper and his backup pilot Alan Shepard concentrated on the final phase of Mercury.
On May 15, 1963, Cooper took off on his first space flight with Mercury-Atlas 9. He had named the spaceship Faith 7. It orbited the Earth 22 times, spending more time in space than its five predecessors combined. He was the first American to sleep in Earth orbit. However, one after the other, various systems failed and Cooper had to fire the braking rockets manually.
34 hours and 19 minutes after launch, it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, completing the Mercury program. Another long-term flight, with Alan Shepard as an astronaut and Cooper as a replacement, was still under discussion, but was no longer carried out in order to be able to concentrate fully on the Gemini program. Gordon Cooper was the last NASA astronaut to fly into space alone.
As part of the Gemini program, Cooper was given command of Gemini 5. Its pilot was Charles Conrad. This flight was carried out from August 21 to August 29, 1965 and set a new long-term record of 190 hours. Cooper was the first astronaut to be in orbit twice, totaling his space experience to 225 hours. For the final flight of the Gemini program, Gemini 12, in November 1966, Cooper was once again assigned as replacement commander, but did not see action.
In the Apollo program, Cooper served as backup commander for Apollo 10, which conducted the dress rehearsal for the moon landing in May 1969. Cooper hoped for a good chance of becoming the fifth person to set foot on the moon as commander of Apollo 13. But when Alan Shepard reported back after a long period of unfitness to fly due to health reasons, command of Apollo 13 went to him. Later, Shepard’s crew was assigned to Apollo 14 to give Shepard more time to prepare. However, command of Apollo 13 was then given to Jim Lovell.
Deke Slayton, who made the crew assignments in the Apollo program, wrote in his memoirs that he never intended to entrust Cooper with another mission and only appointed him as Apollo 10’s replacement commander because of the lack of qualified astronauts. Since the Gemini program, Cooper had been increasingly discredited by NASA management due to his lack of commitment to training and participation in car racing.
Cooper left NASA and the Air Force in 1970. He went into business and worked as a technical consultant in the fields of aeronautics and electronics for various companies. On October 4, 2004, Gordon Cooper died at his home in Ventura, California. He left behind four daughters from two marriages. Some of his ashes were buried in space.
During the Mercury Atlas 9 mission, Cooper used measuring devices designed to detect hidden Soviet missile silos to discover places in the ocean where he suspected treasures in sunken shipwrecks. His notes served as a template for a Discovery Channel documentary soap called Cooper’s Secret.