5 Astronauts More Badass Than Any Action Movie Hero
#4. Gordon Cooper Puts the "Man" in "Manual"
Gordon Cooper flew the last of the Mercury flights, a series of manned expeditions in which NASA took the most highly trained fighter pilots in the history of the world and reclassified them as human cargo, specially designing cargo-fitting space-pants.
The Mercury capsules were created to see if humans could survive in space, and NASA didn't want these important spacecraft to be hindered by the very large lab rats inside.
The Mercury wasn't designed for pilot control, which became a bit of a problem when Gordon Cooper had to pilot one. All the instruments were automatic -- and also useless when Cooper's craft suffered a total electrical failure. Total. Everything. No guidance, no rocket control, not even the readings that told him which way the spacecraft was pointing. The only thing left was the radio, which was wired directly to the batteries, but since David Bowie wouldn't write "Space Oddity" for another six years, there wasn't even anything they could sing, let alone do.
When Cooper realized that a building full of rocket scientists had become about as useful as a chocolate heat shield, he did it himself. Fellow astronaut John Glenn helped him work out a new procedure. Cooper calculated a spacecraft re-entry with fewer tools than you have access to right now -- because you have atmosphere, and the last thing Cooper's dead instruments told him was that the cabin was filling up with deadly carbon dioxide.
Whereas most of us might use our last minutes to tell everyone exactly what we thought of them (especially electricians), Cooper just got on with personally landing the spacecraft, using a plan that would have been considered too unrealistic for most movies. Consider the dilemma presented by Apollo 13, in which the crew had to jury-rig an air-filtration system out of spare parts, and then consider this: Gordon Cooper created an entire steering and re-entry mechanism. He made marks on the window to steer the spaceship by angling it against the stars, and took manual control of the boosters, physically leaning over, pushing and pulling the fuel valves, and timing the bursts with his wristwatch.
During re-entry, the most stressful journey the human body can undertake, he had to manually fire the drogue chute, main parachute, and landing pad (every single step of which had only had two possible outcomes -- "perfect" or "pancake"). And what was his response to the world's most lethal math test?
"... that's really what we'd been wanting to do all along. So, it just gave me the opportunity to do what we'd been wanting to do."
When the test pilot astronaut had to personally take on the entire planet, his response was "Finally!" So when kids complain that they'll never use math in real life? Remind them that it's only true if they're planning on a life that sucks.