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.
In the final few hours before the Senate adjourned for its Memorial Day recess on May 26, lawmakers approved a raft of some 3,400 pending military nominations, including a number of high-profile Air Force and Space Force generals to assignments that will significantly reshape some of the upper echelons of…