COOPER, L(EROY) GORDON, JR.

born March 6, 1927, Shawnee, Okla., U.S. one of the original team of seven U.S. astronauts. On May 1516, 1963, he circled the Earth 22 times in Faith 7, completing the sixth and last of the Mercury manned space flights. At the end of his 34-hour 20-minute flight, when the automatic control system had broken down, he piloted his craft back to Earth manually and landed just 5 miles (8 kilometres) from the primary recovery ship. In August 1965 he served as command pilot of Gemini 5 on an eight-day endurance mission. After brief service with the Marine Corps, Cooper earned a commission with the U.S. Army at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu (194649), and transferred to the Air Force. He received a B.S. in aeronautics (1956) from the Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and served as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, California, until 1959. He resigned from the Air Force and the space program in 1970 and entered private business.