Word: cooperating
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Solo at Sixteen. But Cooper's doubters missed a central point. Aimless as he may sometimes seem on earth, he is a man with a mission-"to go a little bit higher and a little bit faster." Explains a close friend: "All Gordon Cooper is, is a pilot. He's a good one and a smart one, and that's all he wants...
...Cooper was all but born in a pilot's seat. A native of Oklahoma, his father was a lawyer, a county judge from Shawnee-and an amateur pilot. Gordo sat in his father's lap during voyages in an old Command-Aire biplane, took the stick himself by the time he was six. As a teenager, he worked odd jobs around the Shawnee airport to pay for lessons in a J-3 Piper Cub trainer. He was inspired, in part, by stories his father told about two famed acquaintances, Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post. Gordo soloed "officially...
...Gordon Cooper Sr. (who died in 1960) became a legal officer in the Air Force during World War II, liked it so well that he made it a career. Gordo enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school graduation, served in the presidential honor guard in Washington, then joined his parents in their home at Honolulu's Hickam Air Force Base. Attending the University of Hawaii, he met a pert drum majorette named Trudy Olson. Among Trudy's attractions: she owned a third interest in a Piper Cub and taught flying. They were married in 1947; and today...
With that background, Cooper could not resist the temptation to trade his college R.O.T.C. commission for an Air Force lieutenant's bar in 1949. He flew F-84s and F-86s with a fighter-bomber group in Munich for four years, earned an 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...
...Having spent much of his lifetime in the air, Cooper therefore had few fears about space flight. During his Mercury training period, medics were somewhat upset by his habit of falling asleep during the lengthy physical checks. And he was equally unflappable last Tuesday morning when he crawled into his capsule atop an Atlas missile at Canaveral's Pad 14 and waited six hours on his contour couch-for a launch that did not come that day. The countdown was stalled for more than two hours, while some of the world's most brilliant electronics and computer experts...