Goodbye Gordo

Flight Journal, Feb 2005 by Cleaver, Thomas McKelvey

EVER NOTICE THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH OF THAT joke that begins, "I've got good news and bad news"? noticed it this past October 4. While I was celebrating the achievement of SpaceShipOne in bringing widespread public space travel a step closer to reality, the hourly news came on and announced the death of Leroy Gordon Cooper, from heart failure, at age 77. Good news, bad news.

Twenty-two years ago, I was working in a very junior position involved with the movie "The Right Stuff," and that gave me a chance to meet one of the most interesting guys I ever knew: "Gordo" Cooper, who was the last man to go into space alone-a guy far more heroic than NASA ever let us know.

As someone old enough to remember watching the old "Steve Canyon" TV show as a kid, I was actually familiar with Gordo's work before I knew who he was; as it turned out, all the great aerial photography on the show was done by him as he flew an F-102 with a special drop tank that had been modified to carry three cameras. As he was portrayed in the book and the movie, "The Right Stuff," Gordo really was the sort of guy who would volunteer for a night cross-country in a B-25 that nobody else wanted to take just to build up his time. He loved to fly.

Way back on May 15, 1963, Cooper piloted Faith 7; it was the Mercury program's last flight, and it circled the globe 22 times in 34 hours and 20 minutes. What no one knew at the time was that his last five orbits were made while there was an electrical fire inside the ship. It knocked out the radios, so he communicated with the ground via a battery-powered radio on his lap. To get home, he had to take control of the ship and fly it; he had to acquire his no-yaw star with two scratches on the window and had 30 seconds when he came onto the day side of the planet to look outside and manually align the ship with the horizon. If too shallow, he would bounce off into space; if too steep, he would burn up. And then he flew the closest-to-perfect landing made by an American spaceship until Columbia landed at Edwards Air Force Base in April 1981. Back on earth, throughout the mission, NASA told the public: Everything is working perfectly on the perfect space ship to protect the perfect astronaut.

His next flight was in Gemini 5 on August 21, 1965, when he and Pete Conrad established a space-endurance record by traveling more than 3.3 million miles in 190 hours and 56 minutes. The purpose of that flight was to see whether they could stay in space long enough to get to the moon and back. On that flight, they also took the first fuel cell into space. During the second orbit, when they turned the fuel cell on, it went "off the boards" as far as anyone who was reading the operating manual could tell. The mission would have been aborted if Gordo hadn't argued that no one yet knew what the proper operating parameters were for a fuel cell. He reasoned to mission control that since it was powering everything perfectly, why not keep going until it really didn't work? Then, halfway through the mission, the thrusters froze up; they had no way to align the ship and it drifted in orbit. When they had to make a course correction, they vented the waste! That's right-the urine and fecal matter! And they were doing this while down on earth, we were told that everything was working perfectly.

Gordo quit the space program in 1970 when NASA decided not to attempt to carry out a manned landing on Mars (for the Bicentennial in 1976) that he had hoped to command. As he told it, the plan had been to send up two Apollos, each with the third stage of a Saturn, and a full Saturn that kept its second and third stages after it went into orbit. They would then assemble them along with a lander (still in the design stage) and fly that contraption to Mars-four astronauts, two in each Apollo, for a 22-month roundtrip! No one could ever accuse Gordo Cooper of thinking small or backing away from a challenge.

It has always amazed me how NASA managed to take the most amazing adventure in the recorded history of mankind and make it boring. All the missions were like Gordo's missions-hanging it way over the edge-and all those guys were as brave as he was.

Just about everyone who read his obituary probably thought, "Oh, I wondered whatever happened to him," but they didn't really care because they had no clue what a true hero he was. Well. Now you won't be able to say that!

As Gordo always said when you asked him who was the greatest fighter pilot he ever saw: "You're lookin' at him!"

He really was.