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Google shows 10x more "Gordon Cooper" with "astronaut" than "Gordo Cooper", so apparently the nickname never caught on as the usual way to refer to him.Stan 23:32, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)
However, he wasn't the last individual to reach space alone.
Two flights of the X-15 later in 1963 passed the 100 km "edge of space". ... [SpaceShipOne] ...
These two paragraphs are inprecise. If "the last individual" does not rule out non-U.S. astronauts, then China'sYang Liwei and possibly some other Russian astronauts may count. Were there any trips that include "Home Alone" where a single man was on a space station or going home alone where a man went home by himself? --Toytoy 13:59, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)
There are no citations for the supposed quotes. And what's with the strange typography and quotation-mark pictures? Unless this is cleaned up, the whole section should be deleted.
Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is a novel, not a historical work, and it took many liberties with facts. If it's important to say that Yeager began using the term "Spam in a can", then we need a better source than a novel.Dcs002 (talk)02:25, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah it is - a historical novel. It's riddled with fiction, composite characters, made up scenes, and artistic license, all for the purpose of making drama. E.g., Carpenter was depicted as a Marine though he was Navy. Making him a Marine helped expand and legitimize the fiction of John Glenn as the Dudley Do-Right and morality cop of the group. I think the drama really worked, but it was never a historical account, and many of its dramatic inaccuracies were famously offensive to the historical characters depicted (most notably the Gus "Squirmin' Hatchblower" Grissom episode). We need a better source. If that was a Yeager saying, it should be documented somewhere reliable.Dcs002 (talk)04:50, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You mean on p. 113 where it says: "Not only that, there was this fellow from the Navy, Scott Carpenter. He seemed to be a likable sort—but he had never been in a fighter squadron. He had been flying multi-engine propeller planes and had only two hundred hours in jets." ? Wolfe clearly states that Capenter was a Navy officer. I suggest you try reading the book.Hawkeye7(discuss)05:33, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Fair point, my mistake. My memory of Carpenter was wrong (I don't know where that idea came from - it's not in the movie either, which I've seen far more times than I've read the book, so yeah), but there are literary fictions and inaccuracies in the book, like Annie Glenn refusing to see LBJ because of anxiety over her stutter rather than her migraine. She was really upset about that.
More to the point, every reference I can find to "Spam in a can" points back to Hormel or The Right Stuff, even in a NASA document on astronaut psychology. It's consistent with Wolfe's writing. He called it "New Journalism," in which telling the story well, using the tools of fiction writers, supersedes factual accuracy. It's good writing, but at best it's historically unreliable.Dcs002 (talk)11:07, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Is this article worthy of Featured Article status?
level-5 vital article is ratedGA-class on Wikipedia'scontent assessment scale.
Y Nominated.Hawkeye7(discuss)01:20, 30 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
