Fifty years ago, in 1962, America began to take strides toward meeting President John Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon. The humiliation of Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight had been met by two suborbital missions and three Earth-circling voyages. When Wally Schirra ended his nine-hour, six-orbit flight in October 1962, it was considered so successful that some voices within NASA advised ending Project Mercury immediately and pressing on with the two-man Project Gemini. Others countered that one of Mercury's goals was to fly an astronaut for more than a day and long-duration experience was highly desirable in the run-up to Gemini. By the end of the year, the space agency was thus hard at work preparing to close out Mercury in style with a ‘Manned One-Day Mission' (MODM). To history, it would be known as ‘Faith 7' and around the colourful man who flew it would grow a legend which endures to this very day.
Originally planned for April 1963, the scope of the mission expanded in the wake of Schirra's success from 18 to 22 orbits…producing a flight time of around 34 hours in space. To be fair, the MODM would fly for barely a quarter of the Soviet Union's four-day Vostok 3 mission, but its preparations were stupendous. It would demand massive tracking support, including 28 ships, 171 aircraft, 18,000 military personnel and around-the-clock control operations, headed by a pair of veteran flight directors: Chris Kraft and John Hodge. Finally, on 14 November 1962, NASA announced that astronaut Gordon Cooper would fly the MODM, with Alan Shepard as his backup.
Yet the months before the flight were marred with difficulty. The military ‘F-series' version of its Atlas rocket had suffered two inexplicable failures and when Cooper's ‘D-series' booster rolled out of its factory in January 1963 it did not pass its initial inspection. After extensive rewiring of its flight controls, NASA reluctantly announced on 12 February that the launch would be delayed from mid-April until mid-May. To support the astronaut for more than a day in orbit, the Mercury capsule carried better batteries, additional oxygen, extra cooling and drinking water, more hydrogen peroxide fuel, a full load of life-support consumables and an expansive scientific payload. One plan even called for the replacement of Cooper's fibreglass couch with a lightweight hammock, but fears that it might stretch and the astronaut might ‘bounce' meant that the proposal was never approved.
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