Cooper, Gordon (1927-2004), a United States astronaut, was the first person to make two orbital space flights. Virgil I. Grissom made two space flights before Cooper did, but Grissom did not orbit Earth during his first flight.
On May 15-16, 1963, Cooper circled Earth 22 times in the Mercury spacecraft Faith 7. He and Charles Conrad, Jr., orbited Earth 120 times on Aug. 21-29, 1965, in the Gemini 5 spacecraft. Gemini 5 was the first spacecraft to use fuel cells, devices that produce electricity from the chemical reaction between a fuel and oxygen. The flight lasted 190 hours 56 minutes and proved that people could live in a weightless state for the length of a trip to the moon.
Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr., was born on March 6, 1927, in Shawnee, Oklahoma. He attended the University of Hawaii, also spelled University of Hawai‘i, from 1946 to 1949. He received an Army commission through the university’s ROTC program but transferred the commission to the Air Force. Cooper graduated from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1956 and became a test pilot in 1957. He was picked as one of the seven original astronauts in 1959. He resigned from the astronaut program in 1970 and entered private business. Cooper died on Oct. 4, 2004.
See also Mercury.
