landing point. Cooper drew lines on the capsule window to help him check his orientation before firing the re-entry rockets. "So I used my wrist watch for time," he later recalled, "my eyeballs out the window for . Then I fired my retrorockets at the right time and landed right by the carrier." Faith 7 splashed down ahead of the recovery ship, the aircraft carrier . Faith 7 was hoisted on board by a helicopter with Cooper still inside. Once on deck he used the explosive bolts to blow open the hatch. Postflight inspections and analyses studied the causes and nature of the electrical problems that had plagued the final hours of the flight, but no fault was found with the performance of the pilot. On May 22, New York City gave Cooper a ticker-tape parade witnessed by more than four million spectators. The parade concluded with a congratulatory luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria attended by 1,900 people, where dignitaries such as Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and former president Herbert Hoover made speeches honoring Cooper. Project Gemini MA-9 was the last of the Project Mercury flights. Walt Williams and others wanted to follow up with a three-day Mercury-Atlas 10 (MA-10) mission, but NASA HQ had already announced that there would be no MA-10 if MA-9 was successful. Shepard in particular was eager to fly the mission, for which he had been designated. He even attempted to enlist the support of President Kennedy. An official decision that there would be no MA-10 was made by NASA Administrator James E. Webb on June 22, 1963. Had the mission been approved, Shepard might not have flown it, as he was grounded in October 1963, and MA-10 might well have been flown by Cooper, who was his backup. In January 1964 the press reported that the Democratic Party of Oklahoma discussed running Cooper for the United States Senate. Project Mercury was followed by Project Gemini, which took its name from the fact that it carried two men instead of just one. Slayton designated Cooper as commander of Gemini 5, an eight-day, 120-orbit mission. Cooper's assignment was officially announced on February 8, 1965. Pete Conrad, one of the nine astronauts selected in 1962 was designated as his co-pilot, with Neil Armstrong and Elliot See as their respective backups. On July 22, Cooper and Conrad went through a rehearsal of a double launch of Gemini atop