Who was the first US astronaut who flew into space (orbit) twice?
The first US guy to fly into orbit twice was Gordon Cooper. First flight: Mercury/Atlas MA 9 on May 15-16, 1963, for 1 day, 10 hours, 20 minutes. Second flight: on Gemini/Titan 5, June 3-7, 1965, for 7 days, 22 hours, 55 min., with Pete Conrad. However, Gus Grissom was the first US astronaut to fly twice on a rocket into space. But his first flight, on a Mercury/Redstone (MR4) “Liberty Bell” was only suborbital, taking him on a parabola to 190 km altitude on a 15 minute trip, with about 5 minutes of weightlessness on July 21, 1961. He then flew a second time, this time into orbit, on Gemini/Titan 3, on March 23, 1965, for three orbits, with John Young. Incidentally, this flight carried the first computer into space: 74 lbs of miniaturized equipment capable of 7000 calculations a second. With it Grissom was able to compute the thrust needed for orbit changes. From that time, astronauts had gained a genuine ability to “fly” in space, instead of being carried helplessly around the world o
