Word: cooperating
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...that the best of science could provide failed. He had to respond with incredible precision to directions from earth; he had to show a kind of skill and nerve and calm that no man has ever had to demonstrate. While people around the world listened with deep anxiety, Major Cooper seemed cooler than any man on earth. Finally, he piloted his craft into the atmosphere, and his communications blacked out. After four minutes of excruciating silence from space, he was sighted by radar-and moments later, a roar of triumph came from sailors aboard the carrier Kearsarge, 115 miles east...
...Pilot. What kind of man did it take to do what Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. did? Of the original seven U.S. astronauts, "Gordo" Cooper was the youngest (36), slightest (5 ft. 9 in., 147 Ibs.), quietest, least known-and, in the opinion of many, the least likely to win the world's acclaim for a marvel of skill and courage...
...Cooper was the sixth astronaut to enter space-and some officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been reluctant to give him his chance. They tabbed Cooper as something of a complainer, as unpredictable, and as indifferent to building the "public image" demanded of astronauts. Hardly had he entered the Mercury program four years ago when Cooper protested about the time required away from his family. He com plained, too, about the astronauts' lack of opportunity to fly jets-and "incidentally" to collect flight pay. He shied away from the public togetherness of the other astronauts...
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...