For the rest of his life, he always believed that his Mercury colleagues had deprived him of the ultimate achievement, a walk on the Moon. Despite his furious protests and an appeal to higher authority, the decision stood, with the result that Cooper decided it was time to resign from Nasa. Instead, his crew was assigned as back-up for that mission by fellow Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton. Despite problems with the spacecraft's new fuel cells, they were able to test the Gemini radar after releasing a small pod, and then conducted four orbital changes to rendezvous with an imaginary target.By the time they splashed down in the Atlantic, the cabin was full of rubbish, but the mission had provided an important psychological boost by placing the US ahead of the Soviet Union for the first time in the total number of man-hours accumulated in space.Over the next few years, Cooper served as back-up command pilot for Gemini 12 and as back-up commander for Apollo 10, putting him in line for a trip to the Moon on board Apollo 13. "I always had what I think is the natural desire of most pilots to want to go a little bit higher and faster," he wrote later: I had every confidence when I returned to Edwards that I would make the team.

I even told my boss that he ought to start looking for a replacement.Cooper's confidence was not misplaced. He had overcome the odds to become, at the age of 32, the youngest member of the new astronaut corps. After the headline-grabbing success of his Mercury mission, he was assigned as commander of a two-man, long- duration mission in Gemini 5. The main purpose of the eight-day, 120-orbit flight was to investigate how humans would cope with prolonged exposure to zero gravity and to ensure that men flying to the Moon and back would be able to complete a complex series of tasks.When Gemini 5 lifted off from Florida on 21 August 1965, Cooper became the first man to make a second orbital flight.

Accompanied by the rookie Charles Conrad, the crew established a new space endurance record by travelling a distance of 3,312,993 miles in an elapsed time of 190 hours and 56 minutes. Cooper then reported as a student to the Air Force Experimental Flight Test School at Edwards Air Force Base, California. After attending schools in Shawnee and Murray, Kentucky, he turned down the possibility of a football scholarship to enlist in the Marines, but he was too late to see combat in the Second World War.When the war ended, he completed three years at the University of Hawaii and received an Army commission before transferring to the Air Force. Upon graduating in 1957, he was assigned as an aeronautical engineer and test pilot in the Performance Engineering Branch of the Flight Test Division at Edwards.When Nasa announced its intention to recruit the first astronauts, Cooper entered enthusiastically into the selection process. During four years of active duty with the 525th Fighter Bomber Squadron in Munich, Germany, he flew F-84 and F-86 fighters and managed to earn a few credits at the European Extension of the University of Maryland night school.On his return to the US, he attended the Air Force Institute of Technology in Ohio and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1956. An only son, he learned to love flying at the age of five after his father, an Army colonel, took him up in a biplane. "You're looking at him," Cooper would say, flashing a broad grin.Leroy Gordon Cooper Jnr was born in 1927 in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

In an astonishing display of piloting expertise, he brought Faith 7 to a splashdown just one mile off target and only four miles from the recovery carrier.After 34 hours and 20 minutes of flight, during which he had travelled more than half a million miles, the junior astronaut had become the US record-holder and the most experienced member of the entire team. Feted by the nation, he visited the White House, spoke before Congress and enjoyed one of the largest tickertape parades in the history of New York.Years later, his exploits were remembered in Tom Wolfe's best-selling book The Right Stuff (1979), and the subsequent Hollywood movie of the same name. Thereafter, Cooper enjoyed thrilling his listeners by reciting the line spoken by actor Dennis Quaid, when asked who was the best pilot he ever saw. Cooper was assigned to the sixth and final manned flight of the Mercury programme.Early on the morning of 15 May 1963, he clambered feet-first into the tiny, claustrophobic capsule on top of a towering Atlas booster. All around the Cape Canaveral site, tension mounted as the countdown stuttered toward zero.