In April of 1959 Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. was selected to be one of the seven original astronauts in Project Mercury (NASA). According to the NASA website, the astronauts immediately began training for their mission at Langley (NASA). Their training “included a "little of everything" ranging from a graduate-level course in introductory space science to simulator training and scuba-diving” (NASA). While all the astronauts were given different jobs, Cooper’s was to deal with the Redstone rocket, because oh his military background. The Redstone rocket was the first American manned space booster, in other words, it helped the astronauts launch into space. Another job assigned to Cooper was to come up with a design for a survival knife for the astronauts
