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Dry Run. Having spent much of his lifetime in the air, Cooper therefore had few fears about space flight. During his Mercury training period, medics were somewhat upset by his habit of falling asleep during the lengthy physical checks. And he was equally unflappable last Tuesday morning when he crawled into his capsule atop an Atlas missile at Canaveral's Pad 14 and waited six hours on his contour couch—for a launch that did not come that day. The countdown was stalled for more than two hours, while some of the world's most brilliant electronics and computer experts cursed at the refusal of a simple, 275-h.p. diesel engine to start so that the servicing gantry could be rolled away from the poised missile. Although the diesel finally was repaired, the launch was scrubbed at T-minus-13 because of trouble with a vital tracking radar at Bermuda. Cooper could only have been disappointed by the delay, but as he walked slowly away from the missile, he summoned up a grin. "I was," he said, "just getting to the real fun part."
Next morning Cooper was back in his Faith 7 capsule. As he lay on his back, the ten-story-high launch assembly swayed gently. The thin skin of the Atlas popped and clinked with expansion and contraction. Vapor whistled with pitch-pipe tones through the liquid oxygen release valve. Gyros purred—and, to the astonishment of control-center monitors, Cooper's respiration rate dropped to twelve per minute. Astronaut Cooper apparently was taking a catnap.
The countdown went almost perfectly. At 8:04 a.m. (E.S.T.), just four minutes past schedule, the three main engines of Cooper's silvery Atlas thundered to life with lightning-white flame. There was never any doubt about the success of the launching, and as he soared into space, Gordon Cooper, the most reticent of the astronauts, was exultant. "Boy, this is beautiful," he radioed. "Boy oh boy. It looks that pretty. Boy oh boy." On the ground. Cape Communicator Schirra was also elated. "You got a real sweet trajectory, Gordo," he advised. "You're right smack dab in the middle of the plot." Little more could be said: Cooper's velocity, programmed at an ideal of 25,715 ft. per second, was 25,716; his heading was just .0002 of a degree from perfect.
The flight went so well that Cooper, after his initial exhilaration, seemed almost bored. On his second orbit, while over the Pacific between Hawaii and Cali fornia, he dozed for a few moments. Then, on his ninth orbit, after nearly 14 hours in space, his program called for him to try to sleep. Advised Communicator Glenn: "I'm going to tell them [all other communicators] to go away and leave you alone now." Cooper pulled a curtain across his capsule window, allowed his craft to speed untended through outer space. In the silence of such flight, the weightless astronaut has no sensation of movement even when falling upside down. Drowsy and drifting. Cooper fell easily asleep.