Leap of Faith

...And if the astronauts' famously simple monikers-Scott and Gus and Gordo--also mark them as belonging to an earlier, smalltown generation, it's useful to remember that Scott and Gus and Gordo were actually Malcohn (Carpenter), Virgil (Grissore), and Leroy (Cooper)-not so far removed from their nineteenth-century grandfathers who'd crossed the prairies and mountains...

...Shepard has his "ruthless" side...

...Strictly a matter of regulations: each of the Original Seven Mercury...

...He tells of his association twenty" years ago with someone named Valerie Ransone, who claimed to receive signals from "a 'space civilization' of beings more advanced than humans"-a "physically exhausting" process for her, and frustrating, too, since the messages "sometimes reached her at inconvenient timessuch as while driving or in the showerwhen she had no way of writing down the often technical and detailed information...

...With Leap of Faith it's Gordon Cooper's turn to tell his part in this grand adventure that now seems more long ago than far away...

...The storytelling possibilities here, and from Cooper's test-pilot days at Edwards Air Force Base, are considerable, but he's pretty much ghosted out of existence in Leap of Faith...

...I can't find a single reference to Valerie Ransone on the Web, but I'll take Gordo's word for her existence-- even ifI can't take hers for Theirs...

...In February 1993, Clinton told a gathering of businessmen that the program was "a disaster" that entailed too much money going to lawyers...

...So we had loaded into the computer the wrong reentry calculation...

...But had I really been alone...

...Two years later he crammed himself into Gemini 5 with Pete Conrad, a gaptoothed, antic character who died in a motorcycle accident only the summer before last...

...Much of the book is soporific, and, to take one example, a description 68 October 2000 . The American Spectator of how his Atlas booster "stood in the pitch dark like a lone sentry, eerily bathed in columns of white light thrown skyward by huge spotlights"-sounds pretty adverbial and high-falutin' for a guy whose "twang" we've always heard about...

...Forty years later, throwing caution to the windlessness of space, Leap of Faith takes up the subject in a gloriously green-cheesy way: So coolly confident was he atop the rocket that he fell asleep during a hold in the countdown...

...Things are beginning to stack up a little...

...Vice President Gore proposed a nationwide telephone traffic-jam hotline...

...If you had a problem, the administration came up with a government program to address it...

...This, the publicity states, is one astronaut memoir that will take the reader "into the government world of UFO cover-ups...

...By now Tom Wolfe owns the Original Seven as surely as Tennyson does the Light Brigade, and all the shorthand IDs for Wolfe's Right-Stuffensemble players show up here...

...In a rare demonstration of good sense, the U.N...

...Now we have a race between a "compassionate conservative" governor and a virtual-lifetime officeholder who is for "the people," not "the powerful...

...C ooper, the only child of an Air Force colonel, grew up in Shawnee, Oklahoma, a half mile from the airport...

...In 1978 Cooper asked a U.N...

...The ex-astronaut blames Senator William Proxmire (those "Golden Fleece" awards), but every president since Nixon, and every Congress since about the 9and, is guilty...

...Fearful of headline writers, NASA made them cover the "8 Days or Bust" slogan on their mission patch until the?.' actually managed to complete the whole 19~ hours in their claustrophobic two-seater...

...The higher-ups hadn't liked the name Faith 7, either...

...T he 2992 presidential election may perhaps best be described as the triumph of empathy over experience...

...N Giving the people All the _ Painld]lers They Don't Need "Feeling Your Pain": The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years James Bovard St...

...failing to understand how a supermarket scanner worked could cost you valuable support from working morns, and fumbling to explain during a debate how the deficit has personally affected you (in truth, an absurd question), could be deadly...

...But we will know that they exist...

...As Bovard chronicles in his new book, "Feeling Your Pain": The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the ClintonGore Years, such pronouncements are good for public relations, but little else...

...Empathy is still accepted as a necessary trait of a successful candidate...

...And the human race's still nearly pre-Copernican sense of its own importance will collapse...

...And what agonized radio cry did Gordo issue over these nmltiple calainities...

...The citizen army of SETI@home searchers, their hard drives humming automatically through the night, are by contrast conducting a Platonic cosmic romance-something as poignant as it is epistemoC logically hardheaded...

...I would be the last American to fly alone in space...

...TRACY ROBINSON is deputy editor o/The American Spectator...

...This PR-over-substance approach is also evident in President Clinton's promotion of the Brady Handgun Violence 70 O c t o b e r ~ o o o _9 The American Spectator...

...They are looking for no one in particular, and whoever they find will not have been looking for them...

...The program now thrives as a privately funded operation, with direct, practical participation by over two million non-scientists who have SETI@home software on their personal computers and use it to analyze data collected by the project's Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico...

...He brought himself down manualIy, landing so close to the carrier he didn't even need the helicopter...

...The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves...

...When one came along, we'd land on the road, taxi up to the pump, and say, 'Fill 'er up.' Then we'd zoom off...

...We should be so interesting...

...In the course of his aa 1/2 orbits (total flight time five minutes different from Lindbergh's), the capsule lost electrical power, gyroscope function, and the automated control system...

...Any candidate who uttered one would find himself drowned out by a rapidresponse team's rut-furrings about"priorities here at home...

...In fact, the "solutions" often were more harmful than the problems, as in the case of increased availability of government flood relief resulting in more people moving to floodand hurricane-prone areas, or how EPA mandates for smog-reducing additives in gasoline ended up contaminating drinking water with cancer-causing chemicals...

...Kids getting in your hair...

...President Clinton called for more daycare funding...

...if it wasn't reformed, there would be "poison in the ground...

...If the laws of physics are what we believe them to be, the discovered beings will probably never get here any more than we will get there...

...It remains ever thus: Last year's unmanned Mars Climate Orbiter was probably lost through a similarly boneheaded piece of programming...

...Thus far, no one in politics is challenging the govemment policies that arose from the empathy-lest of 1992, asking if they actually worked to make peo...

...failed to follow up...

...the president [LBJ] said somberly, 'I ordered it classified.'" Years later, at a NASA reunion, the fellow who seized the film nervously explained things to Cooper: "You had the most magnificent pictures of Area 51"-which the astronaut characterizes for non-X-Files viewers as the place "where top-secret black-budget research, development, and flight testing, perhaps using reverse technology from captured extraterrestrial vehicles, was rumored to be taking place...

...Empathy had come into its own...

...My falling-apart copy of 196z's We Seven ("by THE ASTRONAUTS themselves") has him carefully stating that "there have been far too many unexplained examples of unidentified objects sighted around this earth for us to rule out the possibility that some form of life exists out beyond our own world...

...For example, Bovard points out how the president has been, at various times, for and against the Superfund environmental clean-up program...

...Finally, in the presidential election year of 1996, Clinton was again trumpeting the still-unreformed program in campaign speeches as a huge success...

...Sooner, he's usually described, in the others' books and now his own, as a "good stick-and-rudder man," a guy so full of beans and himself that he buzzed Hangar S at Cape Canaveral a day before his first hunch, so exasperating Project Mercu~;'s operations director that he nearly lost his mission...

...was the unpleasant 288-point possibility that Deke Slayton recalls in his memoir...

...Martin's Press/426 pages / $:z6.95 REVIEWED BY Tracy Robinson Politics has not changed much since then...

...for the The American Spectator - O c t o b e r ~ o o o 69 first time we shall be looking not into a mirror but through a pane of glass...

...astronauts had to be able to get into a capsule small enough to make orbit with just an Atlas rocket providing the boost...

...But on May 1~, 1963 , Cooper took his place in Faith 7, so coolly confident atop the rocket that he fell asleep during a hold in the countdown...

...NASA LOSES "FAITH...

...Now, it's true that Cooper has always had a soft spot for this stuff...

...I:] ['] ['] IN 1~"1 Ill I~q I: ~'I I: k~, Gordo Leap of Faith: An Astronaut's Journey Into the Unknown Gordon Cooper with Bruce He~derso'a HarperCollins / 279 pages / $~5 REVIEWED BY Thomas Mallon L arge as they loom in memo~,, there wasn't a six-footer among them...

...Cooper now says that he and his Air Force squadron buddies saw flying saucers over Germany in 1951: "They moved at varying speeds--sometimes very fast, sometimes slow--and other times they would come to a dead stop as we zoomed past underneath them...

...This flip-flopping is often quite remarkable...

...He is so empathic that he has no problem changing his position on an issue completely, depending on the audience he is addressing...

...By about page 200, a reader begins to worry that Gordo may soon be claiming to have had a second meeting with Amelia Earhart...

...A few minutes later he got up, came over, and whispered in my ear, "You and I have the same problem.'" Leap of Faith has, alas, a surprise sales angle...

...All, Gordo, what can you do...

...While hotdogging, he watched out for the local FAA man's black Packard, and "when we needed gas, we did what was common practice among pilots then: kept an eye open for a gas station...

...Actually, it's worse...

...Thousands of major and minor federal programs and regulations expanded or created during the last eight years--from Housing and Urban Development vouchers to loans for farmers to federal disaster aid--failed to solve the problems they were designed to address...

...On some level, Cooper must know it himself: "Mars was lost to our generation when the manned mission, originally planned back in the mid296o's for a 1981 launch--which, as the youngest Mercury astronaut, I believed I was in a good position to commandwas canceled...

...The youngish, upstart governor of a small and backward state cared his way to victory over one of the more experienced public servants ever to hold the office of President of the United States...

...The problem with UFO believers-who have done more to damage SETI science than promote it--is this fantasy that ETs are so enthralled by the particular existence of people here on Earth that they can't resist making repeated trips across interstellar space to study, instruct, abduct, and copulate with us...

...And the list goes on and on...

...Over the last dozen years, a shelf of memoirs has appeared, for the most part hasty, ghostwritten affairs that have added less than they should to the serious history of manned space exploration, an effort that--from Shepard's suborbital launch to the departure of Apollo 17 from the moon--lasted a little less time than Franklin Roosevelt's presidency...

...In 2994, he proposed a bill supposedly to fix Supeffund, which Congress did not pass because it perpetuated the worst aspects of the program...

...What's saddest about Cooper's book is the way it shows a man who once did real, heroic work getting us over the next hills--to the Moon, and Mars being reduced, by our 3o-years-long national indifference toward manned space exploration, to a preoccupation with this sort of pixilated crap...

...As American Spectator readers are aware, it is this gap in the political discourse that James Bovard strives to fill with his reporting...

...You won't hear a serious word about manned space exploration during the fall campaign...

...Leap of Faith might better be titled Loss of Faith...

...t's not that They aren't out there...

...Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post dropped in on his father, and Gordo himself started flying before he was old enough for a license...

...Only a crewman's strong grasp saved me...

...Oh, brother...

...After the 1994 election, Clinton was back to denouncing Super fired as an inefficient boondoggle...

...Shepard and Slayton are recently gone, three decades after theA#ollo 1 fire kil]ed Grissore...

...panel to coordinate data on UFO encounters "to determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion...

...Obviously, President Clinton is a master of empathy...

...Indeed, steady congressional bullying of NASA's modestly funded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) during the 8o's and early 9o's should be remembered as a yahooistic disgrace...

...Americans might be better offnow than before President Clinton took office, but according to Bovard, that's no thanks to the myriad of feel-good money giveaways that were created or expanded under the Clinton-Gore regime...

...Nearly every day one administration official or another could be heard speechifying on a new, narrowly targeted tax credit, federal grant, or community empowerment program to help you, the voter, make it in this world...

...The landing, this time, was a hundred miles off: "The genius mathematicians and astronomers who went through all these computer gyrations to give us formulas for our reentry had calculated that the Earth rotates 36o degrees per day, when in fact it rotates 359.999 degrees...

...Only four remain from this group of men who, at one point forty, years ago, were getting 14,ooo fan letters a day...

...It doesn't help that in the course ofboilerplating Leap of Faith, the writer makes at least one big programming error of his own: that Atlas booster dropped into the Atlantic, not the Pacific, on that May morning in '63 . Fortunately, a few solid new pieces of trivia await the space buff...

...Recent, proliferating discoveries of planets in orbit around stars-another ten were announced early in August-ah-nost guarantee that, somewhere, another solar system has given rise to intelligent life...

...Tired of waiting at the airport...

...ple better off in the last eight years...

...And he came closest to dying the day after he splashed down near Hawaii...

...Observing this banter from his rocking chair nearby was President Kennedy...

...Finally, he reports on a visit to JFK's Oval Office, where he was kidded by NASA bureaucrats about having been spotted with some girls in a bar near Cape Canaveral...

...When you multiply that times 12o revolutions in eight days, it gets to be a significant figure...

...A cocky THOMAS MALLON'8 most recent novel is Two Moons (Pantheon...

...Cooper was the youngest of the Seven, six years junior to John Glenn...

...Carpenter is the "poet...

...Like the Babushka Lady's camera in Dealey Plaza, these pictures were soo n, supposedly, confiscated-same as some film Gordo himself shot from Gemini 5. "'Son...

...Ifa discussion of the issue were somehow to last more than half a minute on an MSNBC split-screen, the word "hubris," in connection with man's boorish need to place himself on other spheres, would surely be spoken-- as if mapping the human genome, potential medical miracles aside, hasn't been, in its way, an act of monstrous self-absorption...

...As "the first lifetime nonsmoker in space," Cooper turned out to consume only a fraction of the Mercury-capsule oxygen required by Shepard and Schirra...

...Highway congestion got you down...

...When it became obvious that Congress wasn't biting, Clinton announced that Superfund was necessary...

...Asked to drop an Armed Forces Day tribute, from a helicopter, onto the new Arizona memorial, he "released the wreath, and in my still somewhat weakened state, nearly toppled out the door with it...

...He has other evidence, too: A"good friend" who was at Roswell in '47 assured him that what they recovered there "sure wasn't a weather balloon," and somebody else showed him photos of "a classic saucer, shiny silver and smooth...

...and Glenn is a "born politician...

...Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater ordered the airlines to improve their service, or else...