May 15, 1963

Maj. L. Gordon Cooper Jr. becomes the second Air Force astronaut in space as he makes nearly 22 orbits in his spacecraft, Faith 7. He is the last American to be launched into space alone, he is the first to spend a complete day in orbit, and because of a failure of the automatic system, he is the first to perform an entirely manual re-entry. This is the last Project Mercury space mission.