Mercury Falling

Gordon Cooper, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts whose exploits in blazing the trail to the moon were captured in The Right Stuff, has died at the age of 77. Cooper, the youngest and by most accounts cockiest member of the group, piloted the last of the Mercury missions, the last solo flight by an American in space, and the first which featured a broadcast back to Earth. As with many steps in the fledgling program, the Mercury flight was a harrowing one, as the system designed to control the descent failed, and Cooper had to make a manual descent, still nailing the landing target near the waiting aircraft carrier. Two years later in Gemini 5, he became the first man to return to space as he and Charles Conrad set a space endurance record by traveling 3.3 million miles in 190 hours, 56 minutes. That flight was pivotal in showing that humans could survive in weightlessness and that fuel cells were viable for space flight, two discoveries that set up the jaunt to the moon in 1969.