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University Daily Kansan Thursday, May 23,1963
Cooper Stole the Show Last Week
"Hold It, Gordo —— My Turn To Orbit And Take Shots Of You"
By Larry Schmidt
There's no getting around it: Maj. J. Gordon Cooper's record-setting 22 orbit space flight captured the top rung on the news ladder this past week.
EVERYTHING went perfectly: a blast-off time only four minutes behind schedule, an ideal entry into orbit, and then a trip around the world once every 88:45 minutes at speeds up to 17.546 miles an hour.
Then, 560,000 miles and 34 hours, $ 2 0 \frac{1}{2} $ minutes later, Cooper came down in the Pacific a scent four miles from his intended target and was immediately snatched from the sea by the waiting carrier USS Kearsarge.
After a radar failure in Bermuda forced postponement of Tuesday's scheduled blastoff, the 36-year-old astronaut returned Wednesday morning to the Faith 7 capsule perched atop the waiting Atlas booster missile.
The only hitch in the nearperfect flight came during the last few orbits when the capsule's automatic control system failed.
Cooper successfully managed a manual re-entry into the atmosphere to compensate for having no automatic retro firing or attitude reference.
MERCURY CONTROL computations showed the Faith 7 capsule had the ability of staying up for 32 orbits before the tug of gravity would pull it back into the atmosphere. However, Cooper did not have enough life support equipment aboard to stay up that long.
The mission was nearly four times longer than Walter Schirra's six orbit trip last Oct. 3, but it falls far short of the tandem flights made last August by the Russian cosmonauts, Andrian Nikolayev and Papel Popovich, who remained aloft for 68 and 48 orbits, respectively.
The astronaut, who lost seven pounds on the long flight, was said to have been amazed that he could distinguish buildings
and roads at heights of up to 166 miles.
At a news conference Sunday, Cooper related his adventures in space and told of having slept some five to six and one-half hours during the trip. The relaxed spaceman thought that one might possibly sleep more soundly in space than on Earth.
THE NATION'S latest space hero was scheduled to visit President Kennedy in Washington Tuesday and then go to New York with his family to participate in a tickertape parade as the guest of Mayor Robert F. Wagner.
Officials feel this may be the last flight in the Project Mercury
series. A final decision will be made in about a week.
The director of the manned space flight program for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, D. Brainerd Holmes, says there is a 50-50 chance that it may be another 18 months before a U.S. astronaut goes skyward.
The next project would be the two-man Gemini flight now set for October of 1964.
IN ANOTHER space success, a Polaris A-3 missile scored what a Navy official called "its best flight yet" on an 1,800-mile strike down the Atlantic tracking range.
It was the third straight land-
launched success for the advanced weapon, which is designed to add more than 1,000 miles to the present 1,725-mile range of Polaris submarines.
On the front pages this past week were found many reports of the Negro surge toward equal rights, and the federal government's determination that they be reached.
After new racial violence turned Birmingham, Ala., into a lawman's nightmare, President Kennedy sent some 3,000 troops to wait near the town in case the local police could not handle the riotous situation.
HE ALSO took preliminary steps to federalize the Alabama National Guard and sent Justice Department negotiators back to the troubled steel city in an effort to save the shaky truce worked out between Negro and white leaders the week before.
Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, a staunch segregationist, later filed suit in the U.S. Supreme Court asking for both temporary and permanent restraining orders against use of the federal troops.
The petition said that neither the Alabama legislature nor the governor had appealed to the United States or the President to send in armed forces—something which Wallace contends is necessary under the Constitution.
Justice Department officials in Washington say Kennedy acted under his authority to deal with civil disturbances outlined in Title 10, Section 333, of the U.S. Code. This is the same reference which backed the use of federal forces in Little Rock, Ark., in the 1957 school integration crisis and in Oxford, Miss., last year when riots followed the integration of the University of Mississippi.
KENNEDY AND WALLACE had a chance to talk Saturday when the President flew to Alabama to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Tennessee
Valley Authority. There was no indication that anything had been settled by the conversation.
In the meantime, tension eased in Birmingham itself, and business appeared to be returning to normal although merchants feared a white boycott of sto es. The federal troops remained poised at two military bases within 100 miles of the disturbed city.
Thursday marked the ninth anniversary of the landmark legal decision by which the U.S. Supreme Court held that segregation in the public schools is unconstitutional.
According to the Associated Press, some 257,628 Negro children are now enrolled in previously all-white schools.
At almost the same time, the NAACP announced an all-out drive against Northern school segregation based on housing patterns.
THE CAMPAIGN, which will touch 25 states from New England to California, will be based on Thursday's ruling in the Orange, N.J., case in which the state commissioner of education called on the local school board to end de facto segregation in a predominantly Negro school in time for the opening of the September term.
A House education subcommittee voted Wednesday to cut off all federal aid to public schools that are still segregated as of June 30,1964.
Dailiy Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Telephone Viking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Extension 376, business office
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