'Gordo' Showed American Spirit

Florida Today ^ | 10-6-04 | Unknown

[SmithPatterson]

'Gordo' showed American spirit

The death of Mercury 7 astronaut spotlights the need to continue the exploration of space

The death of Mercury 7 astronaut Gordon Cooper on Monday marks the slow fading away of one of the most rarified and glorified brotherhoods on Earth.

His passing and -- and that of NASA's other original astronauts -- is a loss to all who understand the courage it took to climb aboard a rocket loaded with explosive fuel and trust one's life to the skill of others in a new frontier raw with danger and the unknown.

Today, with the Apollo moon missions ignored for more than 30 years and the International Space Station of little national interest, it may be hard to imagine the far-different world of Brevard County in the early 1960s.

In those days, the eyes of nearly every resident were focused on the skies, and the superhuman job of getting men into space consumed the hopes, dreams and sweat of workers at Cape Canaveral who had one goal:

Catch up with the Russians in the space race during the Cold War, and prove America's technology outpaced that of all the globe.

Into that whirlwind of aspiration walked seven men -- the nation's original star voyagers, who carried the spirits of the free world with them.

Of those Mercury astronauts, the founding fathers of American spaceflight, only three remain: John Glenn, Wally Schirra and Scott Carpenter.

Four intervening decades have taken Gus Grissom, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton and now, Cooper, whose death at age 77 was attributed to heart failure.

Called "Gordo" by his friends, he was far less celebrated than Shepard, the first American in space, and far less well-known than Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.

Instead, Cooper came last, flying the final Mercury mission, a 34-hour, 22-orbit journey, in May 1963.

Back then, Cocoa Beach was filled with reporters from around the world, and launches were broadcast to awestruck viewers on every continent.

In Brevard, space workers' families gathered in yards and on beaches, holding hands, praying and trying by sheer will to keep the rocket on course and bring the astronauts back alive.

Cooper, often called the calmest and most technically oriented of the seven, returned from his flight in a spacecraft called Faith 7, more than living up to his reputation.

In the hours leading up to liftoff, while the launch team was scrambling to solve last-minute snafus, the nerveless Cooper, sealed up in the tiny capsule, managed to take a nap -- the first of several he grabbed on that flight.

Later, in orbit, when warning lights indicated a possible malfunction involving a life-threatening loss of electrical power, his laconic report to ground control was "Things are beginning to stack up a little."

He had to try a manual re-entry, which he did on a voice-prompted manual rocket-firing countdown by Glenn at Mission Control.

Had he missed the split-second timing he would have been dead, but he nailed it.

That coolness under fire earned Cooper and his Mercury brethren what author Thomas Wolfe called "The Right Stuff" -- the combination of piloting skill, spirit of adventure and willingness to risk it all to reach into the universe.

Cooper flew again, making a second orbital flight in 1965 aboard Gemini 5, establishing with astronaut Charles Conrad a then-record for space endurance of nearly 191 hours while traveling 3.3 million miles.

In doing so, they proved humans could survive weightless long enough to go to the moon, and helped make possible four years later Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind.

Today, after a far-too-lengthy hiatus, the United States is again setting its eyes on the moon and then Mars.

It's a noble quest and an honorable memorial to those like Cooper who blazed the trail into space.

Most of them are gone now, leaving it up to us to again reach with courage to the planets and the stars.