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Cooper was in other ways disconcerting. He has a passion for fast cars, drives his 1963 Sting Ray Chevrolet at speeds upward of 100 m.p.h. His humor is unpredictable. Before the first Mercury flight, by Shepard, Cooper was asked to demonstrate to television cameramen how the astronaut would ride to the launch pad in a van and enter a gantry elevator for the space shot. Cooper donned a silver space suit, walked to the elevator entrance—and stopped in mock horror. As cameras whirred, he grabbed a girder and screamed: "No! I don't wanna go! I won't go!" The TV men were amused, but not the NASA officials. Again, during Gus Grissom's suborbital flight. Cooper, who had been flying a chase jet, buzzed the Cape and momentarily disrupted communications. He was severely reprimanded, and it was that sort of stunt that a worried Mercury official had in mind when he said before last week's flight: "He's enough of a daredevil to pull some stunt up there we don't know about."
Solo at Sixteen. But Cooper's doubters missed a central point. Aimless as he may sometimes seem on earth, he is a man with a mission—"to go a little bit higher and a little bit faster." Explains a close friend: "All Gordon Cooper is, is a pilot. He's a good one and a smart one, and that's all he wants to be."
Cooper was all but born in a pilot's seat. A native of Oklahoma, his father was a lawyer, a county judge from Shawnee—and an amateur pilot. Gordo sat in his father's lap during voyages in an old Command-Aire biplane, took the stick himself by the time he was six. As a teenager, he worked odd jobs around the Shawnee airport to pay for lessons in a J-3 Piper Cub trainer. He was inspired, in part, by stories his father told about two famed acquaintances, Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post. Gordo soloed "officially," he now recalls with a grin, at 16.
Gordon Cooper Sr. (who died in 1960) became a legal officer in the Air Force during World War II, liked it so well that he made it a career. Gordo enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school graduation, served in the presidential honor guard in Washington, then joined his parents in their home at Honolulu's Hickam Air Force Base. Attending the University of Hawaii, he met a pert drum majorette named Trudy Olson. Among Trudy's attractions: she owned a third interest in a Piper Cub and taught flying. They were married in 1947; and today they fly in their own Beechcraft Bonanza (Cooper is the only plane owner among the astronauts). Their daughters. Cam, 14, and Jan, 13, sometimes take a supervised turn at the controls.
With that background, Cooper could not resist the temptation to trade his college R.O.T.C. commission for an Air Force lieutenant's bar in 1949. He flew F-84s and F-86s with a fighter-bomber group in Munich for four years, earned an aeronautical engineering degree at Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, qualified for the rugged test-pilot duty at the pioneering Edwards Air Force Base in California—home of the world's highest, fastest jet, the X-15. A few years before his selection as an astronaut, Cooper took a friendly flight with another future Mercury spaceman, Gus Grissom. The two crashed a T-33 trainer off the end of a runway at Denver's Lowry Air Force Base in 1956.