photo #9401790

Aviation CircleOn May 16, 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper was alone in Faith 7, a capsule so small he could barely turn around, on the 22nd and final orbit of the longest American spaceflight yet.Then the systems started dying.First a sensor falsely warned that the capsule was starting reentry. Then a short circuit knocked out the automatic control system, the one that would point the capsule at exactly the right angle to come home. Too shallow, and it would skip off the atmosphere. Too steep, and it would burn up. Then the carbon dioxide level began rising inside his cabin and his suit."Things are beginning to stack up a little," Cooper told Mission Control.Engineers on the ground could see the failures on their screens. None of them could reach inside the capsule.So Cooper did it by hand. He took a grease pencil and drew reference lines on the inside of his window. When Earth's horizon sat on the horizontal line, he knew the capsule was tilted to the correct 34 degrees. He lined the vertical mark up with stars he had memorized before the flight to set his heading. Then he timed the retrorocket burn with his wristwatch, while fellow astronaut John Glenn, aboard a tracking ship in the Pacific, counted him down by radio.He fired the rockets manually. He released the drogue chute manually at 50,000 feet, the main chute at 11,000, and the landing bag just before the water.Faith 7 hit the Pacific 80 miles southeast of Midway Island, 4.4 miles from the aircraft carrier USS Kearsarge. It was the most accurate splashdown of the entire Mercury program.Sailors on the Kearsarge had spelled out "MERCURY 9" on the flight deck in their white uniforms. Thirty-five minutes later, Cooper and his capsule were on board.The lesson stuck. After Faith 7, NASA made sure every astronaut trained to fly the spacecraft by hand.