"Other than that, things are fine."

I’m sorry, but today was just crap. When you awaken to the news that the Mercury Seven are now minus four, you know there ain’t gonna be a trail of rose petals from the bed to the bathroom door.

Gordon Cooper has passed, my favorite of the Seven, an honor previously held by John Glenn until he faded into extreme asshattery in his old age. Gordo was one of those people placed on Earth for the female of the species to develop a crush upon. Sixth in line (the last to fly, Deke Slayton, was medically grounded for years and would not launch until the ‘70’s), he closed out the Mercury days with the longest mission of the program. This is Gordo Cooper: As his capsule, Faith 7, began dying system by system due to electrical failures and God knows what-all, he announced the news thusly: “Well, things are starting to stack up a little bit here.”

He then moved on to Gemini, whupping out an eight-day mission with Pete Conrad in a two-seat capsule the size of the front seat of a Volkswagon. In his later years, he explored the possibilities of extraterrestrial life (Leap of Faith, his autobiography is called), discussing a few Supah-Freaky experiences he’d had as a young test pilot. He revealed that, acting on an concerns expressed by a woman claiming to receive transmissions from unearthy beings, he passed on technical concerns about the cooling system in the then-under construction space shuttle system that likely saved the program. (Whoever this woman is, I need to find her and have her ask the Ewoks about what the hell is going on with the sometimes-working, sometimes-not gearshift light on the Bellemobile.) No matter what you think of the whole ET issue, you gotta give it to the guy for having the testicular fortitude for saying what he thought about it.

We’re down to three, now—Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and Wally Schirra, who, ironically, also functioned as a bit of a subset in the program, having taken the third, fourth, and fifth flights (There. You can conduct your day in peace, now, having been told this.) I bet if you had asked the Seven in those days when the whole world balanced on their shoulders, when they couldn’t twitch a baby toe without a picture of it appearing in Life magazine, when it seemed we’d be opening a K-Mart on Neptune by the end of the Kennedy administration, they’d have expressed outright pissedness at the news that we’ve only achieved private space flight just this week-- the day Gordo died, as a matter of fact. If they knew we rewarded their sacrifices, and those of their on-the-ground brethren, by ceremoniously grounding the entire Apollo program just three years after setting foot on the moon, they’d have kicked our asses around the block. We owe them more. We owe ourselves more.

Anyway: Gordo Cooper. Chilly test pilot, open-minded creative, hottie for the ages. Good tailwinds to you, buddy.