Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr.

Cooper, Leroy Gordon, Jr. (1927– ), first U.S. astronaut to make two orbital space flights. At the end of his 1963 Mercury space flight, the automatic control system broke down, and Cooper succeeded in manually piloting the Faith 7 spacecraft back to earth. In August 1965 Cooper served as command pilot of Gemini 5, which orbited the earth 120 times.