Leap of Faith

An Astronaut's Journey Into the Unknown

Gordon Cooper, Bruce Henderson

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781504054232
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

"An exciting insider's look at Projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo... NASA's internal politics, disasters, glitches and close calls" by a pioneering astronaut ( Publishers Weekly ). Gordon "Gordo" Cooper was one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, pilot for Apollo X, head of flight crew operations for the United States' first orbiting space station, and the last American to venture into space alone. Stretching from the dawning days of NASA to the far reaches of the unknown, Cooper's distinguished career as a record-setting astronaut helped shape America's space program and blazed a trail for generations to come. In this astonishing memoir—written with #1 New York Times bestseller Bruce Henderson—Cooper crosses paths with such aviation luminaries as Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post, and German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun; he shares his early days at Edwards Air Force Base and the endeavors that became the basis for The Right Stuff; he takes us inside NASA with candid accounts of his defeats and accomplishments; he reflects on the triumphs and tragedies of his heroic colleagues; and he finally reveals the reasons behind his belief in extraterrestrial intelligence, including the US military's long-standing UFO cover-ups. Buckle yourself in for a breathtaking ride because in Leap of Faith, Gordon Cooper takes readers to places they've never been before.

1 WE SEVEN

In early January 1959 I received unexpected orders to report to Washington, D.C. At the time I was a thirty-two-year-old air force captain with twelve years of service, based at top-secret Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert.

The best test pilots in the air force were assembled at Edwards, and I had a great job. As a test pilot in the engineering branch, I had the best of both worlds. I saw a project from the design and administrative side as well as from the pilot’s seat. I was testing and flying the nation’s top new aircraft—hot fighters like the F-102 and F-106, and the secret U-2, a reconnaissance aircraft built like a graceful glider (and not much faster than one) with an unusually long wingspan and lightweight fuselage, that could fly higher than the surface-to-air missiles of the day.

A day or two before I was due to leave for Washington, I was called into the base commander’s office with three other test pilots—including one named Donald “Deke” Slayton—who had received similar orders.

Our commanding officer, General Marcus F. Cooper (no relation), asked if any of us knew what our orders were about.

“No, sir,” we all replied.

“No one will tell me anything,” the general groused.

He was a good CO, a lot better than the old-stick-in-the-mud general he’d replaced a year earlier. General Cooper remembered what it was like to be a young pilot, and he was very protective of his men as long as we did the job he asked of us.

“I did see in the paper the other day,” he went on, “that McDonnell Aircraft has been awarded a contract for the new manned space program that’s starting up.”

My ears perked up. I knew nothing about any “manned space program.”

“Gentlemen,” General Cooper said with authority, “if this has anything to do with flying in space, I want you to be very careful what you volunteer for. I don’t want my best pilots to be involved in some idiotic program.”

It had been a little over a year since that historic day in October 1957 when the Russians launched Sputnik, the world’s first manmade satellite. The 184-pound satellite—about the size of a basketball—could be heard by American tracking stations as it orbited Earth making a characteristic “beep-beep” sound. Residents of neighborhoods across the country waited anxiously in their yards and streets, peering into the sky at a fast-moving speck of light that was surprisingly easy to see.

I had realized that Sputnik stood to open up a whole new era, and that the Soviet Union had the potential for being one up on us militarily. It reasoned that people and events on Earth could one day be observed from space. When that happened, there would be nowhere to hide.

Two months later, the U.S. Navy attempted to launch the first American satellite. It was also the first nationally televised rocket launch. Upon completion of the countdown, the Vanguard rocket lifted less than a foot off the ground before the first stage, loaded to the gills with fuel, exploded. The rest of the rocket sank in slow motion toward the ground, embedding itself in the sand next to the launch platform like a burned-out firecracker. It left an indelible image of America’s opening bid in the space race.

Were they now actually thinking of strapping a man onto a rocket?

Unbeknownst to any of us, qualifications for prospective astronaut-pilots had been established by NASA, the newly founded civilian agency designated to lead America’s efforts in space, which had received funding from Congress only after Sputnik. Although the United States did not yet have the spacecraft and other hardware necessary to send a man into space, NASA came up with a list of specific requirements to describe the kind of space pilots it was seeking.

It was believed that they needed to be in their physical prime while possessing a degree of maturity to handle difficult situations. Maximum age was set at forty. Maximum height was five feet, eleven inches, an arbitrary cutoff that eliminated any number of otherwise well-qualified pilots. The spacecraft already on the drawing board had its dimensions dictated by the diameter of the available boosters—the Redstone and Atlas missiles—that would launch it into space. Those dimensions were seventy-four inches wide at the base, and it was determined that once a pilot had on helmet and pressure suit and was strapped in for liftoff, anyone six feet or taller wouldn’t be able to squeeze inside.

The weight limit was set at 180 pounds for two reasons. The first had to do with the finite (and limited) payload of the available boosters—the more a man weighed, the less room there would be for the equipment that would be necessary for a safe and successful mission. Just as important was the belief that anyone who met the height requirement but weighed more than 180 pounds would probably be overweight and therefore have a less than optimal metabolic and circulatory system to handle the stresses of prolonged weightlessness and rapid changes in temperature.

The search for candidates narrowed to the ranks of practicing test pilots—meaning pilots from the air force, navy, and marines, along with a handful of civilians. The theory was that test pilots had the instincts and training required to handle a complex spacecraft traveling at high speeds and high altitudes. It made sense that the same men who were testing our country’s hottest jets should be in the driver’s seat when it came time to launch a manned space vehicle.

A thorough search of personnel records came up with the names of 508 test pilots who met the basic requirements. That list was reviewed further and whittled down to 110. Then a special NASA committee on life sciences, partly on the basis of confidential evaluations of candidates supplied by instructors who had taught the pilots how to fly and others who knew the quality of their nerves and reflexes, narrowed the list down further: to 69 prospective candidates, who were ordered to Washington, D.C.

We met on February 2, 1959, in a large briefing room at NASA headquarters in downtown Washington, not far from the White House. NASA administrators and engineers spent the entire morning giving us a rundown on the space program and what part the astronauts would play.

Project Mercury, the free world’s first program for the manned exploration of space, was so named, we learned, for its symbolic meaning: Mercury was the winged messenger of Roman mythology. The Mercury mission was designed to explore and develop technology necessary to launch a man into orbit. We were told by a group of enthusiastic NASA officials that this would involve newly developed techniques in aerodynamics, rocket propulsion, celestial mechanics, aerospace medicine, and electronics.

“Gentlemen, you have an opportunity few men have even dreamed of. …”

The sales pitch was on. When they got to the part about launching chimpanzees first, there were some raised eyebrows among the fighter jocks. But we knew that if we wanted to go higher and faster and farther, as we all did, this was the way to go. And when I saw what a logical step-by-step program NASA had in mind, and what a major role the astronauts would have in it—not only as pilots but in the engineering development of the program as well—I was pretty sure I wanted in. My only doubts involved having to leave Edwards and all the fun I was having there, for a new civilian start-up program that might or might not make it.

I had been flying some real high-performance airplanes and was getting up to what we then considered high altitudes and high speeds. I had the natural desire of most pilots to go higher and faster. As for space, I had long thought we ought to be trying to extend man’s capacities up there. But to have it presented as a real program, not just some Buck Rogers fiction, was quite a jolt.

Would it actually come to pass? I wondered.

I considered what it would be like to be strapped onto the top of a big rocket and blasted off into the dark realms of space. If I volunteered and ended up being chosen for the program, would I be able to overcome the fear of the unknown and do a credible job of flying the vehicle? These were the same questions I asked myself on a regular basis as a test pilot. The real fear, for me, had always been the uncertainty of the unknown. Would I find a big surprise that I wasn’t prepared for? And if so, would I come up with a way of handling that surprise in order to preserve my life and the mission?

At the end of the day, we were given the choice to return to our bases, no questions asked, or volunteer for continued testing. Thirty-seven men, most of them not willing to make such a radical change in their careers, dropped out of the running and returned home. Thirty-two of us volunteered to take a chance and move on to what promised to be an exhaustive series of medical examinations and psychological tests.

I knew some of the other pilots who were being considered, guys like Deke Slayton from Fighter Operations at Edwards, for example. Some of the navy guys seemed sharp too. I could see that there was going to be stiff competition for what we were told would be a dozen astronaut jobs. At that point I felt I would be lucky if I made the grade, but I wanted a chance to fly in space so much that I was determined to do my best.

The psychological tests, which came first, took many long hours and were hard work but kind of fun too. They were the sort of exams that left you not knowing how well you had done, or even if there were right or wrong answers. The psychologists seemed to be trying to measure our maturity, alertness, and judgment.

There were more than five hundred questions on the personality inventory, designed to dig under the surface in an effort to see what kind of people we were. What was our true motivation for joining the program? Were we too egocentric to work in a team setting? In what the doctors called the “Who ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Prologue
• 1 We Seven
• 2 Liftoff
• 3 Bringing Her Home
• 4 “Gordon Cooper’s UFOs”
• 5 Amelia, Pancho, and Dad
• 6 Back to Space
• 7 Cosmonauts and Deepest Africa
• 8 “Our Germans Are Better Than Their Germans”
• 9 “There’s a Fire in Here!”
• 10 Reaching the Moon and Losing Mars
• 11 Stumbling Across History
• 12 UFOs at the United Nations
• 13 Flying Saucers: Made in the USA
• 14 Help From the Cosmos?
• 15 The Space Shuttle Transmission
• 16 Tesla: Twentieth-Century Genius
• 17 Reservation for an Alien Saucer Ride
• 18 Windows in Time and Space
• Epilogue
• Farewell to a Buddy
• Image Gallery
• Index
• About the Authors
• Copyright