if the spacecraft were lost at sea: "NASA loses Faith". After an argument with NASA Deputy Administrator Walter C. Williams over last-minute changes to his pressure suit to insert a new medical probe, Cooper was nearly replaced by Shepard. This was followed by Cooper buzzing Hangar S at Cape Canaveral in an and lighting the afterburner. Williams told Slayton he was prepared to replace Cooper with Shepard. They decided not to, but not to let Cooper know immediately. Instead, Slayton told Cooper that Williams was looking to ground whoever buzzed Hangar S. According to Cooper, Slayton later told him that President John F. Kennedy had intervened to prevent his removal. Cooper was launched into space on May 15, 1963, aboard the Faith 7 spacecraft, for what turned out to be the last of the Project Mercury missions. Because would orbit over nearly every part of Earth from 33 degrees north to 33 degrees south, a total of 28 ships, 171 aircraft, and 18,000 servicemen were assigned to support the mission. He orbited the Earth 22 times and logged more time in space than all five previous Mercury astronauts combined: 34 hours, 19 minutes, and 49 seconds. Cooper achieved an altitude of at apogee. He was the first American astronaut to sleep, not only in orbit, but on the launch pad during a countdown. There were several mission-threatening technical problems toward the end of Faith 7s flight. During the 19th orbit, the capsule had a power failure. Carbon dioxide levels began rising, both in Cooper's suit and in the cabin, and the cabin temperature climbed to over . The clock and then the gyroscopes failed, but the radio, which was connected directly to the battery, remained working, and allowed Cooper to communicate with the mission controllers. Like all Mercury flights, was designed for fully automatic control, a controversial engineering decision which reduced the role of an astronaut to that of a passenger, and prompted Chuck Yeager to describe Mercury astronauts as "Spam in a can". "This flight would put an end to all that nonsense," Cooper later wrote. "My electronics were shot and a had the stick." Turning to his understanding of star patterns, Cooper took manual control of the tiny capsule and successfully estimated the correct pitch for re-entry into the atmosphere. Precision was needed in the calculation; small errors in timing or orientation could produce large errors in the