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As Faith 7 blasted into the atmosphere, friction set up a curtain of ionization that knocked out communications. While in the ionized layer, Cooper fired small thrusters to make the capsule roll slowly. Once out of the layer, he triggered his drogue parachute by hand at 40,000 ft. His main chute blossomed at 10,000—and he scored his bull's-eye landing off the Kearsarge. Capsule engineers, who constantly complain that astronauts would fly much better if they would just sit back and let their autopilots do the work, ruefully admitted that Cooper proved them wrong. Said an admiring Yardley: "Cooper was as good as any autopilot we ever had."
In physical checks on the Kearsarge, Gordon Cooper displayed a momentary dizziness upon stepping out onto the deck after 34 hours and 20 minutes of weightless flight through 22 orbits—a space trip surpassed only by the 64-and 48-orbit tandem missions of Soviet Cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich last August. He had lost 7 Ibs. since his Canaveral liftoff, and in his dehydrated state, he gulped down four glasses of pineapple juice and six glasses of milk.
Then Cooper did something he does almost as naturally as he flies. He slept for 9½ hours, awoke refreshed. He was placed on a tiltboard, and his pulse and blood pressure were checked in both horizontal and vertical positions. The doctors found that these measurements were normal. With that good news, he was ready to meet his wife and daughters in Hawaii, then to fly to Washington this week for a hero's welcome by President Kennedy and an admiring nation.
* This transmission touched off a disagreement among listeners. Some insisted that the word was "bazoo," some thought it was "gazola," and some heard it as "kazoo." The dispute was not likely to hold up the U.S. space program.