Gordon Cooper

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Gordon Cooper
Gordon Cooper
Country: United States
Organization: NASA
selected on April 2, 1959
(1st NASA Group)
Calls: 2 space flights
Start of the
first space flight: 		May 15, 1963
Landing of the
last space flight: 		August 29, 1965
Time in space: 9d 9h 14min
retired on July 1970
Space flights

Leroy Gordon Cooper , called Gordo , (born March 6, 1927 in Shawnee , Oklahoma , † October 4, 2004 in Ventura , California ) was an American astronaut who flew into space with the Mercury Atlas 9 and Gemini 5 .

military

After high school Cooper undertook in 1945 when States United Marine Corps , the Second World War , however, was to end before the war zones in the Pacific reached.

After he resigned from the Marine Corps in 1946, he moved to Hawaii , where his parents now lived, and studied at the local university. In 1947 he married. In 1949 Cooper joined the US Air Force and was trained as a pilot in Texas and Arizona. In 1950 he was transferred to Germany , where he piloted various types of jets.

In 1954 he returned to the USA and studied at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Ohio , where he received a degree in aeronautical engineering in 1956. After another year of training at Edwards Air Force Base in California , he worked there as a test pilot .

Astronaut activity

Mercury

Cooper was one of 110 test pilots shortlisted for the first astronaut group in the Mercury program . During the tests at NASA , he felt he had done reasonably well and was convinced that he would be selected, so he began making preparations for his departure and move as soon as he returned to the air base. So he was by no means surprised to learn that he was actually one of the seven first astronauts ( Mercury Seven ) at NASA.

On April 9, 1959, he was introduced to the public with the six other astronauts. 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 landing.

During the first two Mercury flights in Earth orbit in spring 1962 ( Mercury-Atlas 6 and Mercury-Atlas 7 ), Cooper worked as a liaison officer ( Capcom ) in flight control. 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 3rd.

Cooper, who was the only one of the seven astronauts still waiting to be deployed ( Deke Slayton was no longer fit to fly due to heart problems), was nominated as the pilot of the last Mercury spaceship on November 13th. While five of his colleagues moved on to new roles in Gemini and Apollo , Cooper and his reserve pilot, Alan Shepard, focused 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 orbit. However, successively different systems failed, and Cooper had to manually detonate the brake rockets.

34 hours and 19 minutes after takeoff, he hit the Pacific Ocean , completing the Mercury program. Another long-term flight, with Alan Shepard as astronaut and Cooper as substitute, was still under discussion, but was no longer carried out in order to be able to concentrate fully on the Gemini program. Cooper was the last NASA astronaut to fly alone into space.

Gemini

As part of the Gemini program with two-man spaceships , 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 with 190 hours. Cooper was the first astronaut to be in Earth orbit twice, adding up 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 a substitute commander, but was not used.

Apollo

In the Apollo program , Cooper served as a substitute commander for Apollo 10 , which conducted the dress rehearsal for the moon landing in May 1969. Cooper hoped for a good chance as the commander of Apollo 13 to be the fifth person to step on the moon. But when Alan Shepard reported back after a long health-related unfit to fly, the command of Apollo 13 went to him. Shepard's crew was later assigned to Apollo 14 to give Shepard more time to prepare. However, the command of Apollo 13 was then transferred to Jim Lovell .

Deke Slayton, who made the crew assignments in the Apollo program, wrote in his memoir that he had never intended to entrust Cooper with another mission, and only appointed him as a replacement in command of Apollo 10 due to the lack of qualified astronauts; However, he had a very small chance of command of Apollo 13 if he had shown an outstanding performance at Apollo 10 - which was not the case. Ever since the Gemini program, Cooper had become increasingly discredited by NASA management due to his lack of commitment to training and participation in car races.

Gordon Cooper (May 2004)

According to NASA

Cooper left NASA and the Air Force in 1970. He switched to business and worked for various companies as a technical consultant in the aerospace and electronics sectors. He was also Vice President of Research and Development at Walter E. Disney Enterprises Inc. from 1974 to 1980 .

In addition, Cooper devoted himself to clearing up the UFO phenomenon. Through personal experiences during his time in the military and NASA, he was convinced that UFOs exist and that extraterrestrial beings are the origin of the phenomenon. In 1985, Cooper wrote a public letter to the UN , in which he expressed his convictions and advocated an international, scientific investigation of the phenomenon.

Gordon Cooper died on October 4, 2004 at his home in Ventura , California . He left four daughters from two marriages. Some of his ashes were buried in space.

The writer Tom Wolfe created a literary monument to him and his six colleagues from the Mercury team in his novel The Right Stuff . The book was made into a film and was shown in German cinemas under the title The Stuff that Heroes are Made of . In the film, Gordon Cooper was portrayed by actor Dennis Quaid .

During the Mercury Atlas 9 mission, Cooper discovered places in the ocean where he suspected treasure in sunken shipwrecks with the help of measuring devices that were actually supposed to detect hidden missile silos of the Soviet Union. His notes served as a template for a docu-soap on the Discovery Channel called Cooper's Secret.

See also

Web links

Commons : Gordon Cooper  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Donald K. "Deke" Slayton, Michael Cassutt: Deke! US Manned Space: From Mercury to the Shuttle . Forge , New York 1994, ISBN 0-312-85503-6 , p. 236.
  2. ↑ Interview with Gordon Cooper. Retrieved May 28, 2008 .
  3. ↑ Article: Space pioneer Gordon Cooper dies. CNN, October 4, 2004, accessed May 28, 2008 .
  4. ↑ Virginia advertises space burials. Spiegel Online , December 13, 2011, accessed December 13, 2011 .
  5. ↑ Augsburger Allgemeine of October 6, 2004, page 19: He paved America's way to the moon
  6. ↑ How an astronaut discovered sunken treasure from space . Vice, April 18, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Cooper, Gordon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cooper, Leroy Gordon (full name); Gordo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astronaut
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Shawnee , Oklahoma, USA
DATE OF DEATH 4th October 2004
Place of death Ventura , California, USA