page_title: Gordon Cooper
section_title: Project Apollo
hierarchical_section_title: Gordon Cooper / NASA career / Project Apollo
caption_attribution_description: English: Apollo 10 backup crew (left to right) Gordon Cooper, Edgar Mitchell, and Donn Eisele shown during water egress training in April 1969.
context_page_description: Leroy Gordon "Gordo" Cooper Jr. was an American aerospace engineer, test pilot, United States Air Force pilot, and the youngest of the seven original astronauts in Project Mercury, the first human space program of the United States. Cooper learned to fly as a child, and after service in the United States Marine Corps during World War II, he was commissioned into the United States Air Force in 1949. After service as a fighter pilot, he qualified as a test pilot in 1956, and was selected as an astronaut in 1959.
  In 1963 Cooper piloted the longest and last Mercury spaceflight, Mercury-Atlas 9. During that 34-hour mission he became the first American to spend an entire day in space, the first to sleep in space, and the last American launched on an entirely solo orbital mission. Despite a series of severe equipment failures, he managed to successfully complete the mission under manual control, guiding his spacecraft, which he named Faith 7, to a splashdown just 4 miles ahead of the recovery ship. Cooper became the first astronaut to make a second orbital flight when he flew as Command Pilot of Gemini 5 in 1965.
context_section_description: In November 1964, Cooper entered the $28,000 Salton City 500 miles (800 km) boat race with racehorse owner Ogden Phipps and racing car driver Chuck Daigh. They were in fourth place when a cracked motor forced them to withdraw. The next year Cooper and Grissom had an entry in the race, but were disqualified after failing to make a mandatory meeting. Cooper competed in the Southwest Championship Drag Boat races at La Porte, Texas, later in 1965, and in the 1967 Orange Bowl Regatta with fire fighter Red Adair. In 1968, he entered the 24 Hours of Daytona with Charles Buckley, the NASA chief of security at the Kennedy Space Center. The night before the race, NASA management ordered him to withdraw due to the dangers involved. Cooper upset NASA management by quipping to the press that "NASA wants astronauts to be tiddlywinks players."
  Cooper was selected as backup Commander for the May 1969 Apollo 10 mission. This placed him in line for the position of Commander of Apollo 13, according to the usual crew rotation procedure established by Slayton as Director of Flight Crew Operations. However, when Shepard, the Chief of the Astronaut Office, returned to flight status in May 1969, Slayton replaced Cooper with Shepard as Commander of this crew. This mission subsequently became Apollo 14 to give Shepard more time to train. Loss of this command placed Cooper further down the flight rotation, meaning he would not fly until one of the later flights, if ever.
  Slayton alleged that Cooper had developed a lax attitude towards training during the Gemini program; for the Gemini 5 mission, other astronauts had to coax him into the simulator. However, according to Walter Cunningham, Cooper and Scott Carpenter were the only Mercury astronauts who consistently attended geology classes. Slayton later asserted that he never intended to rotate Cooper to another mission, and assigned him to the Apollo 10 backup crew simply because of a lack of qualified astronauts with command experience at the time. Slayton noted that Cooper had a slim chance of receiving the Apollo 13 command if he did an outstanding job as backup commander of Apollo 10, but Slayton felt that Cooper did not.
  Dismayed by his stalled astronaut career, Cooper retired from NASA and the USAF on July 31, 1970, with the rank of colonel, having flown 222 hours in space. Soon after he divorced Trudy, he married Suzan Taylor, a schoolteacher, in 1972. They had two daughters: Colleen Taylor, born in 1979; and Elizabeth Jo, born in 1980. They remained married until his death in 2004.
caption: Apollo 10 backup crew (left to right) Cooper, Edgar Mitchell, and Donn Eisele during water egress training in April 1969.
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