Project Mercury Comes to a Close: Faith 7,
L. Gordon Cooper, and the Manned One-Day Mission (MODM)

In a final and welcome design iteration of the Mercury spacesuit, air force pilot Gordo Cooper would enjoy something unique among the Mercury astronauts: a nearly comfortable spacesuit. The Mercury spacecraft, too, had been modified for the planned Manned One-Day Mission (MODM) of 22 orbits, which Cooper would command. Launched from Cape Canaveral on May 15, 1963, just after 8 a.m., Cooper grew accustomed to the comfort of zero G, adjusted his suit temperature controls a few times, and began to work through a raft of experiments—eleven in all (as in MA-7, the tethered balloon failed to eject during MA-9. The “second failure of this experiment was more severely disappointing than the first.”)1

The pilot of Faith 7 took a number of high-quality photographs with a modified Hasselblad camera and performed a hydraulics experiment—all while zipping about the planet once every 88 minutes and 45 seconds. Cooper napped when he could.

Trouble-free nearly until the end (Cooper could be heard singing during orbits 18 and 19), the flight of Faith 7 was not without drama. Toward the end of his nineteenth pass, suddenly, Cooper reported first one systems anomaly and then another, sending Mercury Control into a “flurry of worried activity.”2 On his twenty-first pass, Cooper lost all ASCS and watched with some dismay as carbon dioxide levels rose in both the cabin and his suit. He conceded with typical astronaut understatement to Carpenter, serving as Hawaii capcom, that “things are beginning to stack up a little.” Not to worry. There was always fly-by-wire and manual control.

Years of training for just these systems failures paid off. Like Carpenter aboard Aurora 7, Cooper manually controlled his reentry. With an entire circuit of the planet to plan for manual reentry, the air force pilot easily managed retroattitude: 34 degrees nose down, zero degrees in yaw. After 34 hours and 20 minutes in flight, Faith 7 splashed down, near recovery forces led, once more, by the USS Kearsarge. Once aboard, an “ebullient” Cooper reported with triumph to his debriefers: “We can certainly elongate this mission.”3

NASA project managers Robert R. Gilruth and others agreed—Apollo and the great Saturn rockets were even then “aborning.”⁴