than the story of Gordon Cooper's flight, the longest and final Mercury mission:

Date: 15 May 1963 13:04 GMT. . Landing Date: 16 May 1963. Flight Time: 1.43 days. Flight Up: Mercury 9. Flight Back: Mercury 9. Call Sign: Faith 7. Backup Crew: Shepard, Location of Capsule: Space Center Houston (NASA Johnson Space Center's Visitor Center), Houston, TX. Program: Mercury.

Final Mercury mission, Faith 7, was piloted by Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, Jr. After 22 orbits, virtually all spacecraft systems had failed, and Cooper manually fired the retrorockets and the spacecraft reentered the atmosphere, landing safely in the Pacific Ocean 34 hours, 19 minutes, and 49 seconds after liftoff. Cooper was reported in good condition, and this turned out to be the final Mercury flight.

Memorable quote: Well, things are beginning to stack up a little. ASCS inverter is acting up. And my CO2 is building up in the suit. Partial pressure of 02 is decreasing in the cabin. Standby inverter won't come on the line. Other than that things are fine.

I recommend that article to everyone. It's an amazing story. Cooper would be the last American to fly an orbital mission by himself. I'll have to check, but he may be the last man to fly into orbit alone until the Chinese mission last year.

Those Mercury capsules were amazingly small. The size was limited by the lift capacity of the Redstone and Atlas boosters. If memory serves, all of the astronauts had to be 5' 9" or shorter to fit inside the capsule.

The Mercury capsule had no on-board computing capacity. It used batteries for all of the electrical power. It had an attitude control system but no maneuvering capability. By the standards of orbital manned spacecraft, it was an amazingly simple machine.