Word: astronaut
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Cooper was in other ways disconcerting. He has a passion for fast cars, drives his 1963 Sting Ray Chevrolet at speeds upward of 100 m.p.h. His humor is unpredictable. Before the first Mercury flight, by Shepard, Cooper was asked to demonstrate to television cameramen how the astronaut would ride to the launch pad in a van and enter a gantry elevator for the space shot. Cooper donned a silver space suit, walked to the elevator entrance-and stopped in mock horror. As cameras whirred, he grabbed a girder and screamed: "No! I don't wanna...
More than any other astronaut, Cooper displayed his bitterness at being passed over on earlier space flights. Yet when NASA doctors grounded Astronaut Donald Slayton because of a heart flutter, Cooper threatened to quit the program. After the fifth U.S. man-in-space flight, a superb six-orbit job by Wally Schirra, there were reports that last week's flight would be flown by Alan Shepard. Schirra, a close friend of Cooper's, put an end to that: he threatened to raise a public ruckus if Cooper were bypassed...
...aeronautical engineering degree at Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, qualified for the rugged test-pilot duty at the pioneering Edwards Air Force Base in California-home of the world's highest, fastest jet, the X-15. A few years before his selection as an astronaut, Cooper took a friendly flight with another future Mercury spaceman, Gus Grissom. The two crashed a T-33 trainer off the end of a runway at Denver's Lowry Air Force Base...
...launch assembly swayed gently. The thin skin of the Atlas popped and clinked with expansion and contraction. Vapor whistled with pitch-pipe tones through the liquid oxygen release valve. Gyros purred-and, to the astonishment of control-center monitors, Cooper's respiration rate dropped to twelve per minute. Astronaut Cooper apparently was taking a catnap...
...sleep. Advised Communicator Glenn: "I'm going to tell them [all other communicators] to go away and leave you alone now." Cooper pulled a curtain across his capsule window, allowed his craft to speed untended through outer space. In the silence of such flight, the weightless astronaut has no sensation of movement even when falling upside down. Drowsy and drifting. Cooper fell easily asleep...