Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr.
NASA Astronaut
Nationality	American
Born	March 6, 1927 Shawnee, Oklahoma
Died	October 4, 2004(2004-10-04) (aged 77) Ventura, California
Other occupation	Test Pilot
Rank	Colonel, USAF
Time in space	222h
Selection	1959 NASA Group
Missions	Mercury-Atlas 9 (Faith 7), Gemini 5
Mission insignia

Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr. (March 6, 1927 – October 4, 2004), also known as Gordon Cooper, was an American aeronautical engineer, test pilot and NASA astronaut. Cooper was one of the seven original astronauts in Project Mercury, the first manned space effort by the United States. He was the first American to sleep in orbit, flew the longest spaceflight of the Mercury project, and was the last American to be launched alone into Earth orbit and conduct an entire solo orbital mission. Later he also participated in the Gemini project.

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Cooper was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Gordon grew up there and later moved to Murray, Kentucky where he attended public schools. He was active in the Boy Scouts of America and achieved the second highest rank of Life Scout. In 1945 Cooper turned down the possibility of a football scholarship to enlist in the Marine Corps but was too late to see combat in the Second World War.^[1] After completing three years of coursework at the University of Hawaii he received an Army commission. Cooper met his first wife Trudy while in Hawaii and they married in 1947.

Cooper's grandparents were Philip Cooper, and his wife, Cora Sterns, co-owners of the first general store in Maud, Oklahoma. Philip Cooper's sister-in-law, Maud Sterns, for whom the town was named, was Cora's sister.^[2]

Military career[link]

Cooper transferred his commission to the Air Force in 1949, was placed on active duty and received flight training at Perrin AFB, Texas and Williams AFB, Arizona.

Cooper's first flight assignment came in 1950 at Landstuhl Air Base, West Germany where he flew F-84 Thunderjets and F-86 Sabres for four years. While in Germany he also attended the European Extension of the University of Maryland. Returning to the United States, he studied for two years at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Ohio and in 1957 completed his bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering. Cooper was then assigned to the Experimental Flight Test School at Edwards Air Force Base in California and after graduation was posted to the Flight Test Engineering Division at Edwards where he served as a test pilot and project manager testing the F-102A and F-106B.^[3] Cooper logged more than 7,000 hours of flight time, with 4,000 hours in jet aircraft. He flew all types of commercial and general aviation airplanes and helicopters.

NASA career[link]

Mercury program[link]

Cooper in his Mercury spacesuit, the Navy Mark IV

While at Edwards, Cooper was intrigued to read an announcement saying a contract had been awarded to McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, Missouri to build a space capsule. Shortly after this he was called to Washington, D.C. for a NASA briefing on Project Mercury and the part astronauts would play in it. Cooper went through the selection process with the other 109 pilots and was not surprised when he was accepted as the youngest of the first seven American astronauts.^[1]

Each of the Mercury astronauts was assigned to a different portion of the project along with other special assignments. Cooper specialized in the Redstone rocket (and developed a personal survival knife, the Model 17 "Astro" from Randall Made Knives, for astronauts to carry). He also chaired the Emergency Egress Committee, responsible for working out emergency launch pad procedures for escape. Cooper served as capsule communicator (CAPCOM) for Alan Shepard's first sub-orbital spaceflight in Mercury-Redstone 3 (Freedom 7) and Scott Carpenter's flight on Mercury-Atlas 7 (Aurora 7). He was backup pilot for Wally Schirra in Mercury-Atlas 8 (Sigma 7).

Cooper was launched into space on May 15, 1963 aboard the Mercury-Atlas 9 (Faith 7) spacecraft, the last Mercury mission. He orbited the Earth 22 times and logged more time in space than all five previous Mercury astronauts combined—34 hours, 19 minutes and 49 seconds, traveling 546,167 miles (878,971 km) at 17,547 mph (28,239 km/h), pulling a maximum of 7.6 g (74.48 m/s²). Cooper achieved an altitude of 165.9 statute miles (267 km) at apogee. He was the first American astronaut to sleep not only in orbit but on the launch pad during a countdown.^[1]

"Spam in a can"[link]

Cooper in an SSTV broadcast from Faith 7

Like all Mercury flights, Faith 7 was designed for fully automatic control, a controversial engineering decision which in many ways reduced the role of an astronaut to that of a passenger and prompted Chuck Yeager to describe Mercury astronauts as spam in a can.^[4]

Toward the end of the Faith 7 flight there were mission-threatening technical problems. During the 19th orbit, the capsule had a power failure. Carbon dioxide levels began rising and the cabin temperature jumped to over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Cooper fell back on his understanding of star patterns, took manual control of the tiny capsule and successfully estimated the correct pitch for re-entry into the atmosphere. Some precision was needed in the calculation since if the capsule came in too deep, g-forces would be too large, and if its trajectory was too shallow, it would bounce off the atmosphere and be sent back into space. Cooper drew lines on the capsule window to help him check his orientation before firing the re-entry rockets. "So I used my wrist watch for time," he later recalled, "my eyeballs out the window for attitude. Then I fired my retrorockets at the right time and landed right by the carrier."^[5][6] Cooper's cool-headed performance and piloting skills led to a basic rethinking of design philosophy for later space missions.

Pete Conrad and Gordon Cooper on deck of recovery carrier USS Lake Champlain after Gemini 5 mission.

Gemini[link]

Two years later (August 21, 1965), Cooper flew as command pilot of Gemini 5 on an eight-day, 120-orbit mission with Pete Conrad. The two astronauts established a new space endurance record by traveling a distance of 3,312,993 miles (5,331,745 km) in 190 hours and 56 minutes, showing astronauts could survive in space for the length of time necessary to go from the Earth to the Moon and back. Cooper was the first astronaut to make a second orbital flight and later served as backup command pilot for Gemini 12.

Retirement from astronaut corps[link]

Cooper was selected as backup commander for Apollo 10 and hoped for an assignment as commander of Apollo 13. However, after a falling-out with NASA management, Alan Shepard was chosen instead (Shepard's crew was later moved onto Apollo 14 and the Apollo 13 command went to Jim Lovell). Having flown 222 hours in space, Cooper retired from NASA and the Air Force on July 31, 1970 as a colonel.

Later years[link]

After leaving NASA, Cooper served on several corporate boards and as technical consultant for more than a dozen companies in fields ranging from high performance boat design to energy, construction and aircraft design. During the 1970s, he worked for The Walt Disney Company as a vice-president of research and development for Epcot.

After divorcing his first wife Trudy, Cooper married Suzan Taylor in 1972. He had four daughters, Camala Keoki (Cooper) Tharpe and Janita Lee (Cooper) Stone (both from his first marriage) along with Elizabeth Jo and Colleen Taylor (from his second marriage).

Cooper received an honorary doctorate of science degree from Oklahoma State University in 1967. His autobiography, Leap of Faith (ISBN 0-06-019416-2), co-authored by Bruce Henderson, recounted his experiences with the Air Force and NASA along with his efforts to expose an alleged UFO conspiracy theory. Cooper was also a major contributor to the book In the Shadow of the Moon (published after his death) which offered Cooper's final published thoughts on his life and career.

Death[link]

Cooper developed Parkinson's disease late in life. At age 77, he died from heart failure at his home in Ventura, California, on October 4, 2004. His death occurred on the 47th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch and the same day SpaceShipOne made its second official qualifying flight, winning the Ansari X-Prize. On May 22, 2012, Cooper's ashes were among those of 308 people included on the SpaceX flight that was bound for the International Space Station. This flight, using the "Falcon" launch vehicle and the "Dragon" capsule, was unmanned.

UFO claims[link]

Cooper claimed to have seen his first UFO while flying over West Germany in 1951, although he denied reports he had seen a UFO during his Mercury flight.^[7]

In 1957, when Cooper was 30 and a captain, he was assigned to Fighter Section of the Experimental Flight Test Engineering Division at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He acted as a test pilot and project manager. On May 3 of that year, he had a crew setting up an Askania-cinetheodolite precision landing system on a dry lake bed. This cinetheodolite system would take pictures at one frame per second as an aircraft landed. The crew consisted of James Bittick and Jack Gettys who began work at the site just before 0800, using both still and motion picture cameras. According to his accounts, later that morning they returned to report to Cooper that they saw a "strange-looking saucer" like aircraft that did not make a sound either on landing or take off.

According to his accounts, Cooper realized that these men, who on a regular basis have seen experimental aircraft flying and landing around them as part of their job of filming those aircraft, were clearly worked up and unnerved. They explained how the saucer hovered over them, landed 50 yards away from them using three extended landing gears and then took off as they approached for a closer look. Being photographers with cameras in hand, they of course shot images with 35mm and 4-by-5 still cameras as well as motion film. There was a special Pentagon number to call to report incidents like this. He called and it immediately went up the chain of command until he was instructed by a general to have the film developed (but to make no prints of it) and send it right away in a locked courier pouch. As he had not been instructed to not look at the negatives before sending them, he did. He said the quality of the photography was excellent as would be expected from the experienced photographers who took them. What he saw was exactly what they had described to him. He did not see the movie film before everything was sent away. He expected that there would be a follow up investigation since an aircraft of unknown origin had landed in a highly classified military installation, but nothing was ever said of the incident again. He was never able to track down what happened to those photos. He assumed that they ended up going to the Air Force's official UFO investigation, Project Blue Book, which was based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

He held claim until his death that the government is indeed covering up information about UFOs. He gives the example of President Harry Truman who said on April 4, 1950, "I can assure you that flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on Earth." He also pointed out that there were hundreds of reports made by his fellow pilots, many coming from military jet pilots sent to respond to radar or visual sightings from the ground. He was quite convinced till the day he died that he had seen UFOs and was a strong advocate to make the government come clean with what it knew. ^[8]

In his memoirs Cooper wrote he had seen other unexplained aircraft several times during his career and also said hundreds of similar reports had been made, often by military jet pilots responding to radar or visual sightings from the ground. He further claimed these sightings had been "swept under the rug" by the US government.^[5] Throughout his later life Cooper expressed repeatedly in interviews he had seen extraterrestrial crafts and described his recollections for the documentary Out of the Blue.^[5]

Memorial spaceflights[link]

On April 29, 2007, Cooper's ashes (along with those of Star Trek actor James Doohan and 206 others) were launched from New Mexico on a sub-orbital memorial flight by a privately owned UP Aerospace SpaceLoft XL sounding rocket. Although the capsule carrying the ashes fell back toward Earth as planned, it was lost in mountainous landscape. The search was thwarted by bad weather but after a few weeks the capsule was found and the ashes it carried were returned to the families.^[9][10] The ashes were then launched on the Explorers orbital mission (August 3, 2008) but were lost when the Falcon 1 rocket failed two minutes into the flight.^[11]

Awards and decorations[link]

Cooper received many awards including the Air Force Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross with oak leaf clusters, the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, the Collier Trophy, the Harmon Trophy, the DeMolay Legion of Honor, the John F. Kennedy Trophy, the Iven C. Kincheloe Award, the University of Hawaii Regents Medal and the Columbus Medal. He was a Master Mason (member of Carbondale Lodge 82 in Carbondale, Colorado) and was given the honorary 33rd Degree by the Scottish Rite Masonic body.

Cooper was a member of several groups and societies including the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, the American Astronautical Society, Scottish Rite, York Rite, Shriners, Rotary Club, Order of Daedalians, Confederate Air Force and Boy Scouts of America.

Gordon Cooper Technology Center in Shawnee, Oklahoma is named after Cooper.

Cultural influence[link]

Cooper's accomplishments (along with his widely noted and appealing personality) were depicted in the 1983 film The Right Stuff in which he was portrayed by actor Dennis Quaid. Cooper worked closely with the production company on this project and reportedly, every line uttered by Quaid is attributable to Cooper's recollection. Quaid met with Cooper before the casting call and rapidly learned his mannerisms. Quaid also had his hair cut and dyed to match how the former astronaut's hair looked during the 1950s and 1960s. Cooper was later depicted in the 1998 HBO series From the Earth to the Moon, in which his character was played by Robert C. Treveiler. Cooper appeared as himself in an episode of the television series CHiPs and during the early 1980s made regular call in appearances on Late Night with David Letterman. The Thunderbirds character Gordon Tracy was named after him.

In 2010, Cooper's name and likeness appeared in a mock newspaper advertisement for a fictional ice pop-type product called "Rocket Poppeteers."^[12] The ad was part of a viral marketing campaign for the upcoming J.J. Abrams film Super 8, and was originally accessible only by inputting certain information via one of the film's affiliated websites.^[13][14] The extent of Cooper's relevance to the project was unclear.

References and notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Gordon Cooper

United States Air Force portal

• Cooper Comments
• NASA biography for 40th Anniversary of Mercury 7
• Johnson Space Center biography
• Spacefacts biography
• Remembering 'Gordo' – NASA memories of Gordon Cooper
• Interview with Cooper about UFOs and aliens (with much added speculation)
• Space.com article, Pioneering Astronaut Sees UFO Cover-up
• Out of the Blue at the Internet Movie Database
• Gordon Cooper Technology Center
• Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Cooper, Leroy Gordon
• Gordon "Gordo" Cooper, Jr at Find a Grave
• The Supreme Council: About the Scottish Rite [2]

Edgar Dean Mitchell
NASA Astronaut
Nationality	American
Status	Retired
Born	(1930-09-17) September 17, 1930 (age 81) Hereford, Texas
Other occupation	Test Pilot
Rank	Captain, USN
Time in space	9d 00h 01m
Selection	1966 NASA Group
Missions	Apollo 14
Mission insignia

Edgar Dean Mitchell, Sc.D. (born September 17, 1930) is an American pilot, engineer, and astronaut. As the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, he spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands region, making him the sixth person to walk on the Moon.

Biography[link]

Mitchell was born in Hereford, Texas.^[1] He was active in the Boy Scouts of America where he achieved its second highest rank, Life Scout. He was also a member of DeMolay International and has been inducted into its Hall of Fame.

Mitchell earned a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial management from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1952.^[1] The following year he joined the US Navy where he trained as a pilot and flew off the aircraft carriers USS Bon Homme Richard and USS Ticonderoga. He later qualified as a research pilot and taught at the Navy's research pilot school. While on active duty in the Navy, he earned a Master of Science degree in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and a Doctor of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1] He currently resides in suburban West Palm Beach, FL.

Mitchell is a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, and carried one of the order's badges to the Moon; it is now kept at his home chapter of Kappa Sigma at Carnegie Mellon University.

NASA career[link]

Mitchell studies a map while walking on the Moon, February 6, 1971

Mitchell was selected to be an astronaut in 1966 and was seconded from the Navy to NASA. He was designated as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 10, and flew as lunar module pilot on Apollo 14, where he spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands region, making him the sixth person to walk on the Moon.

Apollo 14 was Mitchell's only spaceflight. He remained with NASA until 1972, when he retired from the Navy.

After NASA[link]

Ed Mitchell was awarded honorary doctorates from the New Mexico State University, the University of Akron, Carnegie Mellon University and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Edgar Mitchell was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1970 by President Richard Nixon.

On June 29, 2011, the United States Government filed a lawsuit against Mitchell in the United States District Court in Miami, Florida after discovering that he possessed a camera used by the Apollo 14 crew on the moon, and had put the camera up for auction at the British auction house Bonhams. The litigation asked that the camera be returned to NASA. Mitchell's position was that NASA had given him the camera as a gift upon the completion of the Apollo 14 mission. Bonhams has withdrawn the camera from auction.^[2] In October, 2011, prosecutors and Mitchell reached a settlement agreement, under which Mitchell gave up any claims to the camera and agreed to return it to NASA, which in turn would donate it for display at the National Air and Space Museum. ^[3]

Other interests[link]

Mitchell's interests include consciousness and paranormal phenomena. On his way back to earth during the Apollo 14 flight he had a powerful Savikalpa samadhi experience^[4], and also claimed to have conducted private ESP experiments with his friends on Earth.^[5] The results of said experiments were published in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1971.^[6] In early 1973, he founded the nonprofit Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to conduct and sponsor research into areas that mainstream science has found unproductive, including consciousness research and psychic events.

Remote healing[link]

Mitchell says that a teenage remote healer who lives in Vancouver and uses the pseudonym Adam Dreamhealer helped him heal kidney cancer at a distance. Mitchell said that while he never had a biopsy, "I had a sonogram and MRI that was consistent with renal carcinoma." Adam worked (distantly) on Mitchell from December 2003 until June 2004, when the "irregularity was gone and we haven't seen it since".^[7]

Views on UFOs[link]

Mitchell has publicly expressed his opinions that he is "90 percent sure that many of the thousands of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, recorded since the 1940s, belong to visitors from other planets"^[8] and that UFOs have been the "subject of disinformation in order to deflect attention and to create confusion so the truth doesn't come out".^[9] Dateline NBC conducted an interview with Mitchell on April 19, 1996, during which he discussed meeting with officials from three countries who claimed to have had personal encounters with extraterrestrials. He offered his opinion that the evidence for such "alien" contact was "very strong" and "classified" by governments, who were covering up visitations and the existence of alien beings' bodies in places such as Roswell, New Mexico. He further claimed that UFOs had provided "sonic engineering secrets" that were helpful to the U.S. government. Mitchell's book, The Way of the Explorer, discusses his journey into mysticism and space.^[10]

In 2004 he told the St. Petersburg Times that a "cabal of insiders" in the U.S. government were studying recovered alien bodies, and that this group had stopped briefing U.S. presidents after John F. Kennedy.^[11] He said, "We all know that UFOs are real; now the question is where they come from."^[12]

On July 23, 2008 Edgar Mitchell was interviewed on Kerrang Radio by Nick Margerrison. Mitchell claimed the Roswell crash was real and that aliens have contacted humans several times, but that governments have hidden the truth for 60 years stating, "I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real." In reply, a spokesman for NASA stated, "NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe. Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue."^[13][14]

In an interview with Fox News on July 25, 2008, Mitchell clarified that his comments did not involve NASA, but quoted unnamed sources, since deceased, at Roswell who confided to him that the Roswell incident did involve an alien craft. Mitchell also claims to have subsequently received confirmation from an unnamed intelligence officer at the Pentagon.^[15][16]

Edgar Mitchell, February 2009

Other projects[link]

Edgar Mitchell appears in the documentaries In the Shadow of the Moon, The Phoenix Lights...We Are Not Alone, and The Living Matrix.

Mitchell has written several articles and essays,^[17] as well as two books. In The Way of the Explorer, Mitchell proposed a dyadic model of reality.^[18]

He is currently the Advisory Board Chairman of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, co-founded by Dr. Carol Rosin^[19] and is a member of INREES.

Mitchell is one of the initial supporters of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly – which would be a first step towards a "world parliament".^[20]

Honors and awards[link]

This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the Polish Wikipedia.

• Presidential Medal of Freedom (1970)
• NASA Distinguished Service Medal
• Navy Astronaut Wings
• Navy Distinguished Service Medal

In media[link]

1998 HBO TV series From the Earth to the Moon – played by Gary Cole

Books[link]

• The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds (1996), G. Putnam & Sons, hardcover, ISBN 0-399-14161-8, 2008 paperback edition: ISBN 1-56414-977-3, audio cassette edition: ISBN 1-57270-019-X
• Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science (1974), G. Putnam & Sons, ISBN 0-399-11342-8

References[link]

• New Mexico Museum of Space History

References[link]

External links[link]

Biography portal

• Edgar Mitchell's home page
• Apollo Lunar Surface Journal: Apollo 14
• Edgar Mitchell MP3 audio – from Shift in Action, sponsored by Institute of Noetic Sciences
• Samadhi in Space interview with Dr. Edgar Mitchell in ascent magazine
• "Release all information on UFOs & ETs", an interview with Mitchell in Soul Travel Magazine
• Edgar Mitchell, member of INREES Institute for Research of Extraordinary Experiences