Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

Gus Grissom had two reasons to be grateful to Wally Schirra. The first came immediately after his ill-fated splashdown on 21 July 1961, when he owed his life to the neck dam designed by his Mercury colleague. The second, however, came only minutes after Schirra’s splashdown in the Pacific at the close of Sigma 7. Grissom’s misfortune had prompted both John Glenn and Schirra to refrain from opening their capsules’ hatches in the water and choosing instead to explosively blow them when on the deck of the recovery ship.

‘‘I blew the hatch on purpose,’’ Schirra wrote in his autobiography, ‘‘and the recall of the plunger injured my hand – it actually caused a cut through a glove that was reinforced by metal. Gus was one of those who flew out to the ship and I showed him my hand. ‘How did you cut it?’ he asked. ‘I blew the hatch,’ I replied. Gus smiled, vindicated. It proved he hadn’t blown the hatch with a hand, foot, knee or whatever, for he hadn’t suffered even a minor bruise.’’ Already close from their three years training together, the two men were also neighbours in Houston and Schirra had agreed to act as the executor of Grissom’s will. Little did he know that he would be called upon to do just that a little over four years’ time.

The euphoria which surrounded Schirra’s return from one of the most productive Mercury missions to date was evident. After a greeting at Pearl Harbour and a day­long stay in VIP quarters in Hawaii, the nation’s latest astronaut hero found himself surrounded by the state’s governor, a senator and military top brass. He was also pleased to be able to verify that he had, in fact, responded correctly to Deke Slayton’s ‘turtle’ question, uttered during the launch. Whilst still aboard the Kearsarge, he asked the communications officer for a copy of the transcript of the first few minutes of his flight – and there it was, on his microphone’s voice recorder, the correct answer: ‘‘You bet your sweet ass I am!’’

Some voices within NASA opted to end Project Mercury immediately, its brief of placing a man into orbit for a lengthy period having been met. The next step on the road to the Moon, the two-piloted Gemini series, was just around the corner, with an inaugural unmanned venture scheduled for sometime in 1964. However, another of Mercury’s original goals had been to fly a mission lasting at least one full day and, although erased in October 1959 due to the growth of the capsule’s weight and power requirements and the limitations of the tracking network, this option returned to the fore shortly after Gus Grissom’s flight. Among officials at the burgeoning Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, Texas, the decision was easy, particularly since long-duration experience prior to Gemini was highly desirable. Early in January 1962, Project Gemini was publicly named as the nation’s interim stepping stone to Apollo and both NASA and McDonnell were hard at work planning a ‘Manned One-Day Mission’ (MODM) to round out Project Mercury in style.

By this time, MSC had effectively replaced the Langley Space Task Group and NASA Headquarters had reorganised Abe Silverstein’s Office of Space Flight Programs into an Office of Manned Space Flight, directed by D. Brainerd Holmes. Silverstein himself had been made director of the Lewis Research Center. By September 1962, days before Schirra’s launch, negotiations with McDonnell settled on a number of configuration changes needed for the MODM flight, which Bob Gilruth hoped to launch as early as April of the following year, using Spacecraft No. 20. The success of Sigma 7 prompted an emboldened NASA, in November 1962, to extend the MODM from 18 to 22 orbits, which would require a stay in orbit of around 34 hours. Such an ambitious venture – surpassing Vostok 2, though little more than a quarter as long as Andrian Nikolayev’s Vostok 3 – was anticipated to cost in the region of $17.8 million and require truly enormous tracking support, since its orbital path would carry it over virtually all of Earth’s surface between latitudes 33 degrees north and south of the equator.

Twenty-eight ships, 171 aircraft and around 18,000 military personnel would be needed to support the mission. Its duration also meant that, for the first time, round – the-clock control operations were required, with a Red Shift flight director (Chris Kraft) and a Blue Shift counterpart (a Canadian engineer named John Hodge). On 14 November 1962, Schirra’s backup, Gordo Cooper, was assigned as the MODM pilot, with Freedom 7 veteran Al Shepard backing him up.

Other problems surrounded the Atlas rocket, whose ‘F-series’ military variant had

suffered two inexplicable failures. When Cooper’s Atlas-D was rolled out of its Convair factory in San Diego in late January 1963, it failed to pass its initial inspections and was returned for rewiring of its flight control system. This led NASA, on 12 February, to officially postpone the originally scheduled mid-April launch until mid-May. Meanwhile, the MODM capsule itself – at the centre of the mission designated ‘Mercury-Atlas 9’ – was being outfitted with more than 180 engineering changes: heavier and larger-capacity batteries for more electrical power, an additional oxygen bottle, extra cooling and drinking water, more hydrogen peroxide manoeuvring fuel, a full load of consumables for the life-support system, various other modified components and, of course, an expanded scientific payload. Providing partial compensation for the added weight, the periscope, which Schirra had considered virtually useless on Sigma 7, was deleted, together with UHF and telemetry transmitters and a rate stabilisation control system. Other plans included removing Cooper’s fibreglass couch and replacing it with a lighter hammock, but fears that its material might stretch and the astronaut might ‘bounce’ meant that this proposal never materialised.

Still, the increasing weight of the later Mercury missions prompted an extensive requalification of the spacecraft’s parachute and landing systems. Other changes included the installation of a slow-scan television unit to monitor both the astronaut and his instruments. In fact, at a press conference on 8 February, Cooper had referred to his mission as ‘‘practically. . . a flying camera’’, in recognition not only of the television unit, but of a 70 mm Hasselblad, a special zodiacal-light 35 mm camera and a 16 mm all-purpose moving-picture camera. Cooper himself would wear a pressure suit which sported a mechanical seal for its helmet, new gloves with an improved inner liner and link netting between the fabrics at the wrist and a torso which afforded greater mobility. His lightweight boots were integrated, providing better comfort and reducing the time it took to put them on. All in all, the suit was much less bulky than its predecessors.

The mission appeared to be back on track by mid-March 1963, when the Atlas passed its acceptance inspection, this time without even a single minor discrepancy. In fact, having defined an offset of the engines to counteract the threatening roll rate experienced by Schirra during his liftoff, the rocket’s contractor confidently believed that they had produced their best bird to date. The delays had, however, pushed the MODM into mid-May and on 22 April the Atlas and its Mercury capsule were mated. As launch drew nearer, Cooper and NASA had their hands full with other problems. Four years after the selection of the Mercury Seven, attitudes towards manned spaceflight had already begun to change, with Philip Abelson, editor of the journal Science, Warren Weaver of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas arguing that the high cost of President Kennedy’s Moon project neglected urgent social and political problems at home.

Therefore, in spite of Schirra’s success, Project Mercury and the manned space effort still had much to prove as the days ticked down towards Cooper’s launch. After much consideration, he had named his ‘spacecraft’ – no longer called a ‘capsule’ – as ‘Faith 7’, to symbolise, he said, ‘‘my trust in God, my country and my teammates’’. Within the higher echelons of the space agency, concerns were

expressed over the name: a mission failure, the Washington Post told its readers, could produce unfortunate headlines, such as ‘The United States today lost Faith’. Much consideration was also given to a ‘Mercury-Atlas 10’ mission, flown by Al Shepard for up to three days, thereby further closing the space-endurance gap with the Soviets. Tests had already shown, as part of NASA’s Project Orbit in February 1963, that a Mercury spacecraft could theoretically endure a four-day mission, although the effects of freezing or sluggishness in its hydrogen peroxide thrusters remained a lingering worry. Shepard himself, naturally, was in favour of a three-day flight, whose allocated spacecraft he had already nicknamed ‘Freedom 7-II’.

Had it gone ahead, it would have been launched sometime in October 1963. Shepard, for his part, even went so far as to lobby John Kennedy to support the extended-duration flight, although the president deferred the final decision, rightly, to NASA Administrator Jim Webb. ‘‘After Cooper finished his day-and-a-half orbital mission,’’ Shepard reflected in a February 1998 interview, ‘‘there was another spacecraft ready to go. My thought was to put me up there and just let me stay until something ran out – until the batteries ran down, until the oxygen ran out or until we lost a control or something; just an open-ended kind of a mission.’’

Even before Cooper’s flight, however, on 11 May, NASA’s newly-appointed deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, Julian Scheer, had emphatically declared that MA-10 would not fly. Webb himself killed off the plan a few weeks later, arguing that Gemini was already planned for long-duration missions – why prove something, only once, with an obsolete system, he asked – and that an accident on MA-10 could postpone subsequent ventures. In mid-June, the mission was officially removed from consideration, its spacecraft placed into storage and the shift to Project Gemini began in-earnest.

For Gordo Cooper, therefore, his own launch, set for 14 May, would be the end of the beginning.

In some ways, Grissom and his younger pilot, John Watts Young Jr, were perfectly matched. ‘‘They were both good engineers who understood their machines,’’ wrote fellow astronaut Mike Collins, ‘‘and liked fooling with them. They were

uncomfortable with the invasion of privacy the space programme had brought into their lives and tried as hard as they could to deflect questions from themselves to their beloved machines. They were generally taciturn but both had strong opinions that could flash unexpectedly… Neither was interested in small talk and they would endure uncomfortable silences rather than fill the void with what they considered ancillary trivia.” Collins, who would fly as Young’s pilot on Gemini X a year later, admitted that the “aw-shucks” demeanour and country-boy drawl cleverly concealed a sharp, talented and analytical mind that would carry him to the Moon twice, to its surface and ultimately to command of the first Space Shuttle mission.

Born in San Francisco on 24 September 1930, Young and his family moved to Cartersville, Georgia, when he was three years old and eventually settled permanently in Orlando, Florida. At around this time, he related in an interview, Young began building model aircraft. It was a hobby that would remain with him throughout high school, together, it seemed, with rockets, which he chose for a speech to his classmates in the 11th grade. Young earned his degree in aeronautical engineering, with highest honours, from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952, receiving coveted membership of the institute’s prestigious Anak Society. He joined the Navy in June of that year and, among his earliest assignments, served as fire control officer aboard the destroyer Laws. During this time, he completed a tour in Korea and a former shipmate would remember his coolness under duress.

“Though only an ensign at the time,’’ wrote Joseph LaMantia, quoted on the website www. johnwyoung. com, “he was the most respected officer on the ship. When we sustained counter-battery fire and enemy rounds were striking the ship, it was John Young’s leadership which kept us all cool and focused on returning that enemy fire… which won the day.’’ After Korea, Young entered flight school at Naval Basic Air Training Command in Pensacola, Florida, learning to fly props, jets and helicopters and later undertook a six-month course at the Navy’s Advanced Training School in Corpus Christi, Texas. With receipt of his wings came four years’ service as a pilot in Fighter Squadron 103, flying F-9 Cougars from the Coral Sea aircraft carrier and F-8 Crusaders from the Forrestal supercarrier. During these years, colleagues would describe him as “the epitome of swashbuckling aviators… he exuded confidence coupled with uncommon ability’’.

This ability, indeed, would ultimately guide him into the hallowed ranks of NASA’s spacefaring corps. But not yet. The selection process to pick the Mercury Seven began early in 1959, at which time Young was just starting Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland; test-flying credentials were a prerequisite for astronaut training. After graduation, he worked as a project test pilot and programme manager for the F-4H weapons system at the Naval Air Test Center in Maryland, evaluating armaments, radar and bombing fire controls for both the Crusader and the F-4B Phantom fighters. During one air-to-air missile test, he and another pilot approached each other’s aircraft at closing speeds of more than three times the speed of sound. “I got a telegram from the chief of naval operations,” Young later quipped, “asking me not to do this anymore!’’ In early 1962, he would also set two time-to-climb world records.

By now a lieutenant-commander, Young’s experience with the ‘Phabulous’

Phantom had made him the obvious choice to set the records as part of Project High Jump. The first, on 21 February, saw him climb to 3,000 m above Naval Air Station Brunswick in Maine in 34.5 seconds; followed, six weeks later, by another attempt from Point Mugu in California, which achieved 25,000 m in 230.4 seconds. In September of that year, after leaving active naval duties as a maintenance officer in Phantom Fighter Squadron 143, he received a phone call from Deke Slayton which marked the start of an astronaut career that would span four decades. Training, though, would be arduous. “You had to learn a lot of stuff,” he said later. “You probably only needed to know one per cent of all the stuff you had to learn. . . but you didn’t know which one per cent it was!”

As pilot of Gemini 3, Young became the first of the 1962 astronauts to fly into space. He was originally assigned to accompany Wally Schirra on backup duties for the mission, but Al Shepard’s grounding turned such plans on their heads. However, Young and Grissom would work well together, providing a good basis for some famous – or infamous – banter whilst in orbit. In fact, when asked by a journalist a few days before launch if he had any qualms about flying with Gruff Gus, Young had deadpanned: “Are you kidding? I’d have gone with my mother-in-law!”

When he was shortlisted as a candidate for the first man in space in January 1961, Andrian Grigoryevich Nikolayev was described by his examiners as ‘‘the quietest’’ of the six finalists. By the time he launched into orbit on 11 August 1962 to begin the longest manned space mission to date, he had earned another nickname: ‘Iron Man’, due to his astonishing stamina and ability to sit alone in an isolation chamber, without stimulus or awareness of the passage of time, for no less than four whole days. Born on 5 September 1929 on a collective farm in the village of Sorseli in the forested Chuvash region of the Volga River valley, he was one of four children and discovered a love of aviation when, aged eight, he visited a nearby airfield. One story from his early years tells how he clambered into the branches of a tree and

announced that he intended to fly from it; fortunately, local villagers changed his mind and persuaded him to come down.

Following his father’s death in 1944, his intention was to support his family, although this was opposed by his mother, who wanted him to gain a full education. Nikolayev entered medical school, then tried his hand at forestry, serving as a lumberjack and timber camp foreman for a time, before joining the Soviet Army. He initially trained as a radio operator and machine gunner, demonstrating “composure under stress’’ when he crashed a flamed-out jet in a field rather than bailing out. Undoubtedly, this was a contributory factor in his selection as a cosmonaut trainee, along with Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov and 17 others in March I960. A bachelor at the time of Vostok 3, he is famously said to have kissed his girlfriend goodbye at the foot of the launch pad. That ‘girlfriend’ – 25-year-old Valentina Tereshkova – would not only become his wife a little over a year later, but would also become the first woman to venture into space.

In stark contrast to the quiet, reserved nature of Nikolayev, that of Vostok 4 cosmonaut Pavel Romanovich Popovich has been described as considerably more extroverted. He was also the only member of the 1960 cosmonaut group to have flown a ‘high-performance’ aircraft, having piloted the MiG-19. Interestingly, although he was shortlisted among the final six candidates for the first Vostok mission, his examiners labelled him ‘‘a puzzle’’ and mysteriously attributed his behaviour to ‘‘secret family problems’’. A lieutenant-colonel at the time of the flight, he became the most senior-ranking cosmonaut yet to reach orbit. Born on 5 October 1930 in Uzyn, within the Kiev Oblast in the north of the then-Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Popovich is today revered as the first ethnic Ukrainian spacefarer.

During his early teens, Popovich apparently so loathed the Nazi occupation that he refused to learn German at school, instead stuffing cotton into his ears and being expelled as a result. He was, it is said, even dressed in old frocks and passed off as a girl by his mother to avoid being sent away to Nazi labour camps. After the Second World War, Popovich worked as a herdsman, before achieving a diploma from a technical school in the Urals and entering the Soviet Air Force. Whilst assigned as a fighter pilot in Siberia, he met his future wife, Marina, a woodcutter’s daughter who became a high-ranking officer and engineer. She was also an accomplished stunt pilot and outspoken UFO researcher, which her husband, too, later embraced. In fact, in 1984, after his retirement from the cosmonaut corps, Popovich headed the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ UFO Commission. Like Titov, he was a voracious reader, an admirer of Hemingway and Stendhal and often quoted the works of the Soviet poets Sergei Yesenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the isolation chamber, he proved very much the opposite of steely Nikolayev: he was more light-hearted and jocular, often relieving the tedium by dancing and singing operatic arias with such gusto that scientists and engineers gathered to listen.

As Grissom moved smartly through his post-landing checks, a quartet of Sikovsky UH-34D helicopters, despatched from the recovery ship Randolph, were already on the scene. One of their crews, Jim Lewis and John Rinehard, had been tasked with raising Liberty Bell 7 from the water, after which the astronaut would explosively blow the hatch, exit the capsule and be winched aboard the chopper. Seconds after splashdown, Grissom radioed Lewis, callsigned ‘Hunt Club 1’, to ask for a few minutes to finish marking switch positions. Finally, after confirming that he was ready to be picked up, he lay back in his couch and waited. All at once, he recounted, ‘‘I heard the hatch blow – the noise was a dull thud – and looked up to see blue sky… and water start to spill over the doorsill’’. The ocean was calm, but Mercury capsules were not designed for their seaworthiness, particularly with an open hatch, and Liberty Bell 7 started to wobble and flood. Grissom, who later admitted that he had ‘‘never moved faster’’ in his life, dropped his helmet, grabbed the right side of the instrument panel, jumped into the water and swam furiously. ‘‘The next thing I knew,’’ he said, ‘‘I was floating high in my suit with the water up to my armpits.’’

Although both cap and safety pin were off the detonator, Grissom would later explain that he did not believe he had hit the button to manually blow the hatch. ‘‘The capsule was rocking around a little, but there weren’t any loose items… so I don’t know how I could have hit it, but possibly I did,’’ he told a debriefing that morning aboard the Randolph. Lewis, meanwhile, had to dip his helicopter’s three wheels into the water to allow Rinehard to hook a cable onto the now-sinking Liberty Bell 7. ‘‘Fortunately,’’ Lewis recounted, ‘‘the first time John tried, he managed to hook-up while the capsule was totally submerged.’’ Grissom, by now in the water, was puzzled, anxious and then angry when the helicopter did not lower a horse collar to hoist him aboard. Lewis, whose own training had shown him that Mercury pressure suits ‘‘floated very well’’ and had seen the astronauts apparently enjoying their time in the water, had no idea that Grissom was actually close to drowning. The astronaut had inadvertently left open an oxygen inlet connection, which allowed water to seep into his suit and air to leak out, thus reducing his buoyancy. Although he closed the inlet, some air also seeped from the neck dam, causing him to sink lower and regret the weight of souvenirs in his pockets.

Grissom did not know that Lewis was himself struggling with the spacecraft: in addition to the waterlogged capsule, the landing bag had filled with seawater and it now weighed in excess of 2,000 kg – some 500 kg more than the helicopter was designed to lift. Although Lewis felt he could generate sufficient lift to raise Liberty Bell 7 and take it back to the Randolph, every time he pulled it clear of the water and it drained, a swell would rise and fill the capsule again. Lewis’ instruments told him that the strain on the engine would allow him only five minutes in the air before it cut out. He therefore released the $2 million capsule to sink in 5,400 m of water and requested that another chopper fish Grissom from the water while he nursed his own aircraft back to the ship.

Unaware of the difficulties the astronaut was having – they assumed that his frantic waving was to assure them that he was fine – it was several more minutes before the second helicopter, with the familiar face of George Cox aboard, dropped him a horse collar, which he looped around his neck and arms (albeit backwards) and was lifted to safety. Grissom was so exhausted that he could not even remember the helicopter had dragged him across the water before he finally started ascending. He had been in the water for only four or five minutes, ‘‘although it seemed like an eternity to me,’’ he said later. His first request upon arrival on the Randolph’s deck

The unsuccessful attempt to hoist Liberty Bell 7 from the ocean.

was for something to blow his nose, as his head was full of seawater. A congratulatory call from President Kennedy fell on deaf ears as, for the first time, “my aircraft and I had not come back together. In my entire career as a pilot, Liberty Bell 7 was the first thing I had ever lost”. Worse was to come. At his first post­mission press conference, and in the years to follow, Grissom would be grilled by journalists, not over the success of his mission, but over the festering question of whether he had contributed to the loss of his spacecraft by blowing the hatch. It was an accusation that Grissom would refute until the day he died.

Not surprisingly, his temperature and heart rate were both high when he arrived aboard the Randolph. Physicians described him as “tired and… breathing rapidly; his skin was warm and moist”. Years later, although it was known that Grissom had an abnormally high heart rate, Tom Wolfe, in his bestselling book ‘The Right Stuff5, would point to his physiological state as ‘evidence’ that he had panicked inside Liberty Bell 7 and possibly blown the hatch. Even Grissom, at his first post­flight press conference in Cocoa Beach’s Starlight Motel, admitted that he was ‘‘scared’’ during liftoff, an admission later jumped upon by the media as proof that America’s second spaceman had displayed a chink of weakness. Test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base in California scornfully mocked that Grissom had ‘‘screwed the pooch’’ – had made a terrible mistake – and even the astronaut’s two sons were lambasted by their schoolmates for the loss of the capsule. In his own summing-up for Life magazine, Grissom admitted that ‘‘if a guy isn’t a little frightened by a trip into space, he’s abnormal’’. Chris Kraft agreed, pointing out that ‘‘if you weren’t nervous, you didn’t know what the hell the story was all about’’.

A subsequent investigation from August to October 1961, which included Wally Schirra on its panel, would determine that the astronaut did not contribute in any way to the mysterious detonation of the hatch. Indeed, said Schirra, whose design of the neck dam had helped save Grissom’s life, ‘‘there was only a very remote possibility that the plunger could have been actuated inadvertently by the pilot’’. During the inquiry, Schirra, fully-suited, even wriggled into a Mercury simulator himself and, no matter how hard he tried, could not ‘accidentally’ trigger the hatch’s detonator. One of the conclusions reached by the Space Task Group was that a 76 cm-diameter balloon would be installed in future capsules to allow recovery ships to pick up the spacecraft if the helicopters were forced to drop them.

Many other engineers and managers shared the astronauts’ conviction that Grissom was blameless. However, even though confidence in him remained high and he went on to command the first two-man Gemini mission, the stigma refused to go away. Some engineers continued to mutter of ‘‘a transient malfunction’’, but had no ability to identify it because the evidence lay on the floor of the Atlantic. Not until 1999 would Liberty Bell 7 be salvaged and raised to the surface.

Grissom himself participated exhaustively in the investigation. ‘‘I even crawled into capsules and tried to duplicate all of my movements,’’ he said, ‘‘to see if I could make the whole thing happen again. It was impossible. The plunger that detonates the bolts is so far out of the way that I would have had to reach for it on purpose to hit it. . . and this I did not do. Even when I thrashed about with my elbows, I could not bump against it accidentally.” Moreover, to hit the plunger manually would have required sufficient force to produce a nasty bruise, which Grissom did not have. Possibilities explored over the years have included the omission of the ring seal on the detonator’s plunger, static electricity from the helicopter, a change of temperature of the exterior lanyard after splashdown or – a hypothesis that Grissom supported – the entanglement of the lanyard with the straps of the landing bag. Walt Williams, writing in Deke Slayton’s autobiography, considered the astronaut to be blameless, but thought it “very possible’’ that he had bumped the plunger accidentally with his helmet.

Launch pad leader Guenter Wendt, speaking in 2000, fiercely discounted all theories but one: the entanglement of the exterior lanyard. “It is the most logical explanation,” he said, but acquiesced “Can we prove it? No.’’ It is a pity that the mishap – however it happened – should have, in the eyes of the public, marred what had otherwise been a hugely successful mission and which cleared the way for John Glenn’s historic orbital flight in February 1962. Was the unfortunate, twice-cracked Liberty Bell to blame for its spacegoing namesake’s watery demise? All Grissom would say was that Liberty Bell 7 “was the last capsule we would ever launch with a crack in it!’’

Cooper almost missed out on flying in Project Mercury entirely. Since his selection in April 1959, he had steadily gained a reputation for himself, firstly as a hotshot pilot with a passion for fast cars, but also as a complainer who pulled dangerous stunts, including one in an F-106 jet which screamed right outside, and below, Walt Williams’ office window. Moreover, Deke Slayton wrote of his personal surprise that Cooper had been chosen as an astronaut at all. ‘‘My first reaction was, something’s wrong,’’ he noted. ‘‘Either he’s on the wrong list or I am. Gordo was an engineer at Edwards. As far as I was concerned, he wasn’t even a test pilot.’’

Test pilot or not, if Schirra had been flying before he was born, then Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr was all but born in a pilot’s seat. His father, an Air Force lawyer, county judge and pilot from Shawnee, Oklahoma, frequently plopped his young son onto his lap in the cockpit of an old Command-Aire biplane, even allowing the boy to take the controls at the age of six. Later, in his teens, Cooper would hang around at the airport in Shawnee to pay for lessons in a J-3 Piper Cub trainer; inspired to fly, it seems, from his own experiences and from his father’s tales of the famed aviation aces Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post. He soloed, ‘officially’ at least, at the age of 16. It would garner a lifelong fascination with aviation which Cooper would retain for the rest of his life. Even in his seventies, he once told an interviewer that ‘‘I get cranky if I don’t fly at least three times a month!’’

His love of fast cars also became legendary during his astronaut days, as Gene Kranz, arriving at Cape Canaveral for his first day at work, related in his book ‘Failure Is Not An Option’. ‘‘After the plane rolled to a stop,’’ Kranz wrote, ‘‘a shiny new Chevrolet convertible wheeled to a halt just beyond the wing tip. An Air Force enlisted man popped out, saluted and held open the car’s door for a curly-haired guy in civilian clothes, a fellow passenger who deplaned ahead of me.’’ The curly-haired man offered Kranz a lift to the Cape, which he accepted, then ‘‘peeled into a 180- degree turn and raced along the ramp for a hundred yards, my neck snapping back as he floored the Chevy. I had never driven this fast on a military base in my life.’’ For a while, Kranz wondered if he had a madman behind the wheel as the driver seemingly broke every rule in the book and apparently cared nothing for being pulled over by the Air Police. ‘‘Hitting the highway,’’ Kranz continued, ‘‘he made a wide turn and a hard left, burning rubber. In no time, he had the needle quivering between 80 and 90 miles an hour. After a joyful cry of ‘Eeeee-hah’, he turned and offered his hand, saying ‘Hi, I’m Gordo Cooper’. I’d just met my first Mercury astronaut!’’

Born on 6 March 1927 in Shawnee, Cooper attended primary and secondary schools in his hometown and in Murray, Kentucky, and enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduation. The Army and Navy flying schools, he found, were not taking any new candidates that year. He promptly left for Parris Island, South Carolina, but the Second World War ended before he had an opportunity to see combat and he was assigned to the Naval Academy’s Preparatory School and was an alternate for Annapolis; Cooper was given Marine guard duty in Washington, DC, and was serving there with the Presidential Honour Guard when he and other reservists were released from service. After his discharge, he moved to Hawaii to live with his parents – his father, at the time, was assigned to Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu – and it was whilst there that he met his future wife, Trudy. A drum majorette at the University of Hawaii, she owned a third interest in a Piper Cub and taught flying. She would be the only Mercury Seven wife to hold a pilot’s licence in her own right. In fact, when Cooper joined the astronaut corps, he and Trudy were the only members of the Mercury Seven to own an aircraft: a Beechcraft Bonanza.

The couple married in Honolulu in August 1947 and lived there for two years as Cooper pursued his degree at the University of Hawaii. Whilst studying, he received a commission from the Army’s Reserve Office Training Corps, transferred to the Air Force and was called to active duty for flight training at Perrin Air Force Base, Texas, and Williams Air Force Base, Arizona. Cooper received his pilot’s wings in 1950 and was attached to the 86th Fighter-Bomber Group at Landstuhl, West Germany, flying F-84 and F-8 jets and later commanding the 525th Fighter-Bomber Squadron. Whilst in Europe, he attended an extension of the University of Maryland’s night school, returning to the United States in 1954 for detachment to the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. From here, he received a degree in aeronautical engineering in August 1956 and was sent to Edwards Air Force Base in California for a year at test pilot school.

It was at around this time, in Denver, that he first flew with another Air Force pilot named Gus Grissom; the pair crashed a T-33 jet off the end of the runway at Lowry Air Force Base, though thankfully both were unhurt. Graduation from Edwards brought rapid reassignment to the fighter section of the famed base’s Flight Test Engineering Division as a project engineer and test pilot. Whilst there, Cooper worked on the F-102A and F-106B development efforts. Then, early in 1959, he read an announcement that McDonnell had been awarded the prime contract to build a space capsule. Shortly afterwards, he received mysterious orders to attend a classified briefing in Washington. After undergoing the Lovelace and Wright – Patterson tests, he was so confident that he would be picked by NASA that he told his boss to start looking for a replacement and took two weeks’ leave to move his family to Langley, Virginia. When NASA called him to ask how soon he could get to Langley, Cooper replied “How about now?’’

Despite his flying credentials and engineering talent – he designed a personal survival knife and chaired the Emergency Egress Committee for Project Mercury – Cooper’s early days within the astronaut corps were somewhat less than illustrious and would lead several senior managers to consider bypassing him entirely for a spaceflight. He was, some said, a complainer, unpredictable, with a seemingly indifferent stance towards the public image that NASA wanted each of its astronauts to display. Cooper protested, for example, about the lengthy periods away from his family, about the lack of opportunities to fly jets and collect flight pay and, in fact, when Deke Slayton was grounded from Delta 7, he even threatened to leave the programme. Flying a chase plane over Cape Canaveral during Gus Grissom’s July 1961 ascent, Cooper buzzed the launch site, momentarily disrupting communications and earning him a severe ticking-off from superiors. On another occasion, he flew to Huntsville in Alabama, landed on a runway that was too short and asked to be refuelled. When ground crews objected that it was too dangerous for him to take off again, Cooper shrugged, took off regardless and made it to a nearby air base with fumes in his tanks. . .

Even in the weeks leading up to Cooper’s own mission, Faith 7, there were persistent rumours in the press that he might be dropped in favour of his backup, Al Shepard. In fact, so shaky was operations director Walt Williams’ ‘faith’ in Cooper that he had approached Shepard several months earlier and strongly hinted that the Freedom 7 pilot might be tipped to fly instead. Believing the mission to be his, Shepard continued training feverishly, but Deke Slayton – removed from his own flight – felt that Faith 7 belonged to Cooper. Others agreed that it would reflect badly on NASA if the astronauts were switched so soon before launch.

A timely intervention by Wally Schirra, who threatened to raise the roof if his friend was overlooked, eventually contributed towards securing Cooper his seat on the very last Mercury mission. Shepard was livid and Williams admitted that the Freedom 7 flier could have done a better job, but that the decision had been made

and it was now his job to ensure that Cooper was as prepared as possible. As partial compensation, Williams half-promised Shepard the three-day MA-10 mission. This never transpired. (Shepard later gained his revenge by lending Williams his Corvette for the day… then, as the operations director drove off, phoned security to inform them that ‘someone’ had just stolen his car.)

Perhaps reacting to these frustrations, two days before the scheduled launch, Cooper took a flight in an F-106 and, to the great surprise of Walt Williams and Chris Kraft, made a very low pass over Cape Canaveral. ‘‘We were talking,’’ Kraft recalled of that Sunday afternoon in Williams’ office, ‘‘and a sudden roar came upon us. The roar was a jet airplane diving onto the Cape at a very high rate of speed, which was forbidden. We looked out the window to see none other than Gordo.’’ Cooper flew beneath the second-floor office window and the astonished managers were actually able to look down on the screaming jet. The Cape, of course, was restricted airspace and its switchboard quickly lit up with frantic calls. Williams went berserk, according to onlookers, and threatened to have Cooper’s ‘‘ass on a plate!’’

He called Deke Slayton, who had to shout down the phone to be heard over the F-106’s roar, and Williams argued that Cooper should lose Faith 7. He even contacted Al Shepard, asking him if he and his pressure suit were ready to go. Slayton, however, refused to pull Cooper off the mission, but expressed serious reservations about the astronaut’s judgement. Both he and Williams allowed Cooper to sweat about his flight status for a day to put some fear into him. Not until late on the evening before launch did the operations director finally relent and agree to let him fly. Although many would come to regard him as a daredevil, Cooper’s supporters described him as a good, smart pilot, a man with a mission ‘‘to go a little bit higher and a little bit faster’’. In May 1963, he would fly his highest and fastest mission so far.

Two weeks before Grissom and Young’s launch, the gradual progress of the American civil rights movement exploded into violence when 600 protestors marching from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama were attacked by club-wielding, tear-gas-spraying police. As a result, 7 March 1965 would become forever known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

At the time, Selma – seat and main town of Dallas County – had a population that was 57 per cent black, although fewer than one per cent was actually registered to vote. The vast majority of the black community lived beneath the poverty line in mundane, unskilled occupations, a situation which the Boynton family and others sought to rectify. Their efforts to achieve this had been hampered since the late Fifties by the White Citizens’ Council, the Ku Klux Klan and direct violence. The situation reached a head in February 1965, when an Alabama state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson as the latter tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a nocturnal demonstration.

Jackson’s murder was the catalyst for the first of three Selma-to-Montgomery marches. The initial plan was for the marchers to ask Alabama Governor George Wallace if he had authorised the troopers to shoot during the demonstration, which ultimately broadened with Martin Luther King’s desire to request better protection of black voting registrants from Wallace.

The reaction from the governor, disturbingly, was that the march represented a threat to public safety and he opposed it. Mounted police awaited the marchers and, in the presence of journalists, attacked them with clubs, tear gas and bull whips. Amelia Boynton, one of the organisers, was beaten and gassed and 17 other marchers were hospitalised.

Two days later, on 9 March, King organised a second march. Numbers had by now swelled to more than 2,500 in outraged reaction to the images from Bloody Sunday. However, an attempt to gain a court order to prevent the police from interfering was rejected by a federal district judge, who instead issued a restraining order to stop the march until further hearings could be held. To avoid breaking the terms of the order, King led the marchers out to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, held a short prayer session, then turned them around and disbanded. Violence, however, was not far away. That evening, three white ministers involved in the second ‘march’ were clubbed by white supremacists. One of the ministers, James Reeb, later died from his injuries.

After finally gaining approval for an unimpeded march, the full journey along Route 80 through rain and cold was completed from Selma to Montgomery on 24 March. Five months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Voting Rights Act, which prohibited states from preventing their citizens from voting on the basis of colour or race. Previous practices of requiring voters to pass literacy tests before being cleared to cast at the ballot box were abolished. Moreover, states with a history of abuses over voting rights could not make any changes without first requesting the consent of the Department of Justice. A wind of change had taken hold in America.