Despite a series of severe equipment failures, he successfully completed the mission under manual control, guiding his spacecraft, which he named Faith 7, to a splashdown just 4 miles (6.4 km) ahead of the recovery ship.

His father enlisted in the United States Navy during World War I, and served on the presidential yacht USS Mayflower.

He was called to active duty during World War II, and served in the Pacific theater in the Judge Advocate General's Corps.

[5] He left for Parris Island as soon as he graduated from high school,[2] but World War II ended before he saw overseas service.

[2][4][8] At college, Cooper was active in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC),[8] which led to his being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in June 1949.

[8] On completion of his flight training in 1950, Cooper was posted to Landstuhl Air Base, West Germany, where he flew F-84 Thunderjets and F-86 Sabres for four years.

He aborted the takeoff, but the landing gear collapsed and the aircraft skidded erratically for 2,000 feet (610 m), and crashed at the end of the runway, bursting into flames.

[10] Cooper and Grissom attended the USAF Experimental Flight Test Pilot School (Class 56D) at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1956.

Aware that NASA wanted to project an image of its astronauts as loving family men, and that his story would not stand up to scrutiny, he drove down to San Diego to see Trudy at the first opportunity.

[15] The identities of the Mercury Seven were announced at a press conference at Dolley Madison House in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1959:[16] Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton.

To continue earning their flight pay, Grissom and Slayton would go out on the weekend to Langley Air Force Base, and attempt to put in the required four hours a month, competing for T-33 aircraft with senior deskbound colonels and generals.

Cooper traveled to McGhee Tyson Air National Guard Base in Tennessee, where a friend let him fly higher-performance F-104B jets.

[32] After an argument with NASA Deputy Administrator Walter C. Williams over last-minute changes to his pressure suit to insert a new medical probe, Cooper was nearly replaced by Shepard.

The clock and then the gyroscopes failed, but the radio, which was connected directly to the battery, remained working, and allowed Cooper to communicate with the mission controllers.

"[40] Turning to his understanding of star patterns, Cooper took manual control of the tiny capsule and successfully estimated the correct pitch for re-entry into the atmosphere.

Postflight inspections and analyses studied the causes and nature of the electrical problems that had plagued the final hours of the flight, but no fault was found with the performance of the pilot.

At the end of the successful test, the erector could not be raised, and the two astronauts had to be retrieved with a cherry picker, an escape device that Cooper had devised for Project Mercury and insisted be retained for Gemini.

[52] Cooper and Conrad chose an embroidered cloth patch sporting the names of the two crew members, a Conestoga wagon, and the slogan "8 Days or Bust" which referred to the expected mission duration.

Cooper competed in the Southwest Championship Drag Boat races at La Porte, Texas, later in 1965,[61] and in the 1967 Orange Bowl Regatta with fire fighter Red Adair.

[67] Slayton later asserted that he never intended to rotate Cooper to another mission, and assigned him to the Apollo 10 backup crew simply because of a lack of qualified astronauts with command experience at the time.

[68] Dismayed by his stalled astronaut career, Cooper retired from NASA and the USAF on July 31, 1970, with the rank of colonel, having flown 222 hours in space.

[71][72] In Cooper's autobiography, Leap of Faith, co-authored with Bruce Henderson, he recounted his experiences with the Air Force and NASA, along with his efforts to expose an alleged UFO conspiracy theory.

[73] In his review of the book, space historian Robert Pearlman wrote: "While no one can argue with someone's experiences, in the case of Cooper's own sightings, I found some difficulty understanding how someone so connected with ground breaking technology and science could easily embrace ideas such as extraterrestrial visits with little more than anecdotal evidence.

According to Cooper's accounts, when they returned later that morning they reported that they had seen a "strange-looking, saucer-like" aircraft that did not make a sound either on landing or take-off.

[80] A portion of Cooper's ashes (along with those of Star Trek actor James Doohan and 206 others) was launched from New Mexico on April 29, 2007, on a sub-orbital memorial flight by a privately owned UP Aerospace SpaceLoft XL sounding rocket.

[83][84] On May 22, 2012, another portion of Cooper's ashes was among those of 308 people included on the SpaceX COTS Demo Flight 2 that was bound for the International Space Station.

The second stage and the burial canister remained in the initial orbit that the Dragon C2+ was inserted into, and burned up in the Earth's atmosphere a month later.

[91][92] Cooper was a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Astronautical Society, Scottish Rite and York Rite Masons, Shriners, the Royal Order of Jesters, the Rotary Club, Order of Daedalians, Confederate Air Force, Adventurers' Club of Los Angeles, and Boy Scouts of America.

[94] Cooper was later portrayed by Robert C. Treveiler in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, and by Bret Harrison in the 2015 ABC TV series The Astronaut Wives Club.

That year, he was also portrayed by Colin Hanks in the Season 3 episode "Oklahoma" of Drunk History, written by Laura Steinel, which retold the story of his Mercury-Atlas 9 flight.