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Leap of Faith: An Astronaut's Journey into the Unknown | 
 enlarge | Authors: Gordon Cooper, Bruce Henderson
Publisher: HarperTorch
Category: Book
Buy New: $62.58
New (1) Used (4) from $3.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  35 reviews
Sales Rank: 661418
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0061098779
Dewey Decimal Number: 629.450092
EAN: 9780061098772
ASIN: 0061098779
Publication Date: January 1, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Book is brand new, and has never been opened. Thousands of satisfied customers!
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Book Description
One of the original Mercury 7 astronauts -- a select group of the nation's top military test pilots chosen for America's newly formed manned space exploration program -- Gordon Cooper made history. Now, in this compelling, down-to-earth memoir, he recalls his adventurous life pushing the envelope in the cockpits of planes and spacecraft alike. He also looks toward the next millennium of space travel, offering deeply held views on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence -- including the distinct possibility that we have already made contact.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 30 more reviews...
 That was a long wait! August 5, 2008
This isn't a review because I haven't read the book yet, but I want to say that I saw Gordon Cooper on a talk show in the 1970s or early 1980s, describing how he and other test pilots chased the lights emitted by these spacecraft and that it was common knowledge by NASA that these things existed. As he seemed to be a very intelligent, forthright and plain speaking person, I believed him. I just can't imagine why it took him so long to write a book. Did NASA keep him from talking?
 Houston, we have a problem... September 14, 2006
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Over the past few years I have rediscovered my fascination with the 1960s space race by reading several books by or about people connected with NASA back in those glory days. After reading "Leap of Faith" I have now read biographies of all the Mercury Seven astronauts. The good news is that Gordon Cooper's book is easily one of the most interesting. The bad news is that I don't exactly mean that as a compliment.
For about two thirds of this book Cooper recounts his days with NASA and here he is, pardon the expression, on solid ground. The passages feel a bit rushed and his interpretation of events differ from other viewpoints you may have read, but he's Gordon Cooper and he's earned the right to have his say.
Unfortunately, the NASA days are only part of Cooper's life story and it's the remaining one third of the book where he drives himself into the ditch. I knew from other sources that Cooper firmly believes flying saucers have visited the Earth and our government has conspired to keep the truth from us. I don't believe this myself, but again, he's Gordon Cooper and he has earned my respect. I was willing to listen to what he had to say.
A few UFO stories would have been fine, but Cooper shoots himself in the foot and destroys whatever credibility he had when he recounts his relationship with Valerie Ransone who he met in the late 70s. Ransone claimed to receive telepathic messages from space aliens and wanted to use the knowledge she was gaining to start something called the Advanced Technology Group. Of course, this group needed some funding to get itself going.
Rarely, if ever, have I read a book before where something becomes painfully obvious to the reader but of which the author remains blissfully unaware. Ransone begins to use Cooper for his name and prestige to obtain money for what is nothing more than a huge scam. Cooper never seems to catch on. His viewpoint always seems to be "It might be true, therefore it is true."
The lowest point in this silliness comes when Ransone announces that the aliens are coming to Earth to give Cooper a ride in one of their saucers. Cooper, as gullible as can be, prepares for his expectant UFO flight just as he had for any of his NASA missions. It comes as absolutely no surprise, to anyone but Cooper I guess, when shortly before the flight the aliens are forced to cancel. Apparently there was a political squabble over this proposed flight back on the homeworld. Darn the luck.
One is left to wonder if Cooper really believed all this nonsense or if he was just including it as a way to make his book stand out and sell a few more copies. Either way, it's a pretty poor way for a true American hero to act.
Cooper and the Saturn VIII June 27, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I too was first confused by Coopers reference to the Saturn VIII. After reading other books about Chris Kraft and Werner Von Braun, it dawned on me that he was referring to the Nova rocket that was on the drawing boards in the early sixties by Werner Von Braun. See the Wikipedea for more information. The Nova rocket was conceptualized before the powers that be decided on the LOR (Lunar Orbit Rendevous). Everybody, including Von Braun thought the best approach was the direct ascent, which was to land a rocket vertically and blast off from the moon and return home. The other option explored was (EOR) or Earth Orbit and Rendevous, where the componets for direct ascent were to be launched individually and assembled in earth orbit, then on to the moon. The winner, LOR, was scoffed, but through perseverance, it won out as the quickest way to get to the moon with the lightest payload. Therefore, the Nova (Coopers Saturn VIII) was never needed.
I'll admit this threw me for a while too. It was worded as if it existed. It never existed beyond the conceptual level. Wikipedia has a picture showing it having a 50' diameter first stage and 8 engines while the Saturn V had a 33' diameter first stage and 5 engines. The height would have been just 10' taller than the Saturn V. It would have been a beast at lift off.
I thought the UFO reference's a little far fetched, and I've read that the confication of film after the gemini lauch was improbable. Cooper says the film was developed right there on the recovery ship and I've heard this was never the procedure. Maybe he's right and their is a conspiracy after all!
 Al Shepard as Darth Vader? Naaaah. November 27, 2005
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
This work has produced a rather hefty array of responses from Amazon readers, many of whom are stridently opposed to Cooper's career-long pursuit of the secrets of UFO's and other mysterious new technologies, and others who see in the Mercury astronaut a hero of what now appears to be a cause losing steam. Our focus here is on the book, however. For as several reviewers have correctly observed, this is a tale of two Gordo's, one battling the unknowns of space, and the other battling the knowns of the NASA/military industrial complex.
Unfortunately, neither tale is particularly compelling. The account of the astronaut's career, coming as it did in 2000, was the tail of the dog in a string of early astronaut autobiographies as the pioneers rushed to beat the Grim Reaper with their version of events. As to the second, Cooper's extensive research and observations about UFO's are not as deliciously crazy as some would like us to believe, either. In fact, some of his conjectures about alien propulsion systems and the like are rather fascinating to the layman.
While Cooper has been a busy man since leaving NASA thirty-something years ago, it would seem that something he neglected to do is read what others around the space program were writing in those three decades, and specifically what they were writing about him. One Amazon reader in this sequence of reviews reports to having collected 150 such volumes himself. The general consensus of post-Apollo writers seems to be that Cooper's years with NASA are somewhat enigmatic. One of the original seven Mercury astronauts, he was the last one to fly, a statement of sorts about how the NASA hierarchy regarded him. [Oddly, NASA's "the best shall be first" policy in Mercury resulted in Cooper's complex and spectacularly successful Faith 7 two-day marathon, the last flight in the Mercury series.]
Cooper and Pete Conrad would fly the Gemini 5 mission in the summer of 1965 to test fuel cells, endurance and, as the author observes wryly, defecation technique. But after Gemini 5, Cooper becomes an invisible man. He was designated to the back-up crews of three future flights, the last of which, Apollo 13, he turned down as a political slight.
So why did the hero of Faith 7 fall out of favor in succeeding years? This is the question most readers today would probably bring to the book. The author himself never does soul-searching about his own role in why his space career stalled. Instead he boils his dilemma down to two words: Al Shepard. Cooper believes that Shepard, embittered by his health problems and eager to get back into rotation, used his influence with Deke Slayton, then assigning crews, to keep the Mercury hero under the radar. Cooper's distrust of Shepard appears to date back to his Faith 7 days in 1963 when he asked Wally Schirra to privately tail Shepard, then Cooper's back-up, during pre-flight training.
Cooper cites the Shepard/Slayton cabal as symptomatic of the increasing bureaucracy of NASA, the military, and the federal government. He notes, for example, his complaint in a conversation with President Lyndon Johnson that his photography from Gemini 5 had been seized and classified. Johnson coolly informed him that he, the president, had given the order. It is important for the reader to observe keenly Cooper's misadventures with government entities, for they are of one weave with his later criticisms of government cover-up in the reporting of UFO sightings and general hostility toward individuals like himself at the outer margins of technology, from this world or another.
If Cooper feels that he was blackballed by Shepard and Slayton, what can we say of astronauts Jim Lovell, Frank Borman, Gene Cernan, and Pete Conrad, to name several whose careers thrived under the Slaton-Shepard regime? Lovell, in fact, flew four space missions [two Gemini, two Apollo] after Cooper's Gemini 5, and he is living proof that the "evil duo" was not completely adverse to the emergence of "stars" in the astronaut corps.
No, the answer to Cooper's dilemma is more personal, and probably reflects nagging doubts in NASA about Cooper's manageability and application to the growing complexity of the space business. In this Cooper was hardly alone. Nearly all of the original Mercury Seven had difficulty adjusting to a bigger astronaut corps, greater bureaucracy, public relations, politics, and the general idea of "teamwork." It is no accident that Schirra and Shepard, the two Mercury veterans to fly Apollo, each chose all rookie teams. [Walt Cunningham of Apollo 7 would refer to Schirra as "the cock of the walk."] Schirra himself found the new NASA so discomfiting that he passed on a sure moon landing assignment and retired.
Because Cooper does not really address his own career difficulties with insight, the charges of some historians that Cooper did not train or apply himself sufficiently will still be left to hang out there in the foreseeable future. This is regrettable, because Cooper, like his colleague Scotty Carpenter, was one of the true multidimensional human beings of the early space program. And I give him a great deal of credit for his respect of John Glenn and others for whom timing and luck made them national heroes.
Given Cooper's colorful space career, his subsequent employment by Disney, among others, comes as little surprise. The intrepid pilot of Faith 7 became--how can I put it?--a magnet for scientific entrepreneurs, some of remarkable brilliance, some eccentrics, and some undecipherable. Cooper apparently never lost touch with his astronaut friends, but he certainly picked up new ones along the way, including the mysterious clairvoyant and purveyor of character Valerie Ransone who seems to have preoccupied his personal and scientific attentions for a period in the 1980's. Perhaps if he had met Valerie in 1965, it would be Gordon Cooper making that giant leap for mankind.
The Best... And the Worst October 4, 2005
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Very good book as long as it deals with the space program, full of anecdotes. I learned a lot. (I have almost 150 books about the American Space Program). If you believe in UFO's then you will love all the book, if you don't you may be disappointed by some of Gordon Cooper's allegations.
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