Sorry folks. Recently I reported that Gordo Cooper was the last of the Mercury Seven. D'oh. He is in fact survived by John Glenn, Wally Schirra and Scott Carpenter. Here's a report of the remaining astronauts of that group gathering for a wake. I'm quoting it wholus bolus from Reuters anyway.
Then there's this op-ed piece I found.HOUSTON (Reuters) - The last of the seven Project Mercury astronauts who pioneered U.S. space exploration in the 1960s remembered one of their own as a fearless pilot with the "right stuff" in an emotional memorial ceremony on Friday for Gordon Cooper. Cooper died on Oct. 4 at the age of 77 in his Ventura, California, home, leaving only John Glenn, Wally Schirra and Scott Carpenter from the seven young men selected in 1959 to lead the Cold War space race against the Soviet Union.
"In flying terms, most of these people up on this platform have a lot more runway behind them than ahead of them," Glenn, 83, said at Johnson Space Center.
"Gordo has scrambled, he's out there ahead of us with Gus and Al and Deke, and I'm sure we'll all rendezvous out there someday," he said, referring to late Mercury astronauts Gus Grissom, Alan Shephard and Deke Slayton. Glenn, the former U.S. senator from Ohio, remembered several humorous incidents involving Cooper as well as his bravery in space on the two missions he flew -- the 22-orbit Faith 7 flight that concluded the Mercury program in 1963 and the eight-day Gemini 5 flight in 1965.
On the Faith 7 flight, he manually took over controls after a technical malfunction and coolly fired landing rockets at just the right instant to steer his space capsule home, Glenn said. "He was asked a little later how it worked out and Gordo, in his
best technical language, in NASA unapproved communication procedure, replied 'landed right on the old kazoo."' Glenn said, drawing a laugh from a crowd that included a number of major figures from NASA's earliest days. "You could always depend on Gordo," he said.Carpenter, 79, recalled that the Cold War hopes of the United States were seen as riding on the shoulders of the Mercury 7. "This was at a time when world opinion had it that pre-eminence in space was a condition of national survival," he said. Cooper, he said, was a key figure in giving the group a sense of solidarity: "It is proper now to say farewell, Gordon Cooper. It was an honor being a member of your fraternity."
"We regret losing Gordon, he was one of our dear friends," said Schirra, 81. "Not too bad of a water skier, not too bad of a pilot, but a heck of a good astronaut."
Astronauts Mike Fincke and Gennady Padalka aboard the International Space Station paid tribute to Cooper by ringing the ship's bell three times.
While Wally Schirra said upon his old comrade’s death that Mr. Cooper “was not
the hotshot flyboy that Dennis Quaid played in ‘The Right Stuff,’” I have to believe that there was a kernel of truth in that portrayal. I have a color photograph on mywall of six of the Mercury astronauts and their wives (the Glenns are missing) posing at the White House with Jack and Jackie. JFK and five of the other men are standing, the five smiling yet striking respectful attitudes in the presence of their commander in chief. But one man sits in front in the president’s own famous rocking chair, his posture supremely relaxed, a big, bright, “Look at me” grin on his face. It’s Gordon Cooper.Mr. Quaid aside, the picture perfectly fits this observation by Tom Wolfe: “Cooper may have had his blindspots.... So what if, by outward standards, he had not had the
most brilliant career of all the seven astronauts? The day was young! He was only thirty-two! Cooper’s fighter jock self-esteem seemed to be like a PAR lamp. It was as if wherever he landed, his light shone ’round about him, and that was the place to be... and the picture of him in that place was good.”
It's a great, quick read. Don't miss it.
- Art Neuro
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