Tuesday Trivia: June 15, 2021

Test your Oklahoma knowledge and win prizes by answering our weekly Tuesday Trivia question. Every week, we’ll choose a winner from the correct respondents to receive a prize—from an Okie sticker to a subscription to Oklahoma Today and more.

Space. The final frontier. And since Oklahoma knows about about frontier life, it's no wonder that our residents have been part of the U.S. space program since the early days. One of those is Shawnee native Leroy "Gordo" Cooper, Jr., who was part of both the Mercury-Atlas 9 and Gemini 5 missions. The stories go that Gordo loved flying so much that he learned to pilot his family's small airplane by the time he was 8. By age 12, he was flying solo. That independence served him well, as in 1963, while piloting the spacecraft Faith 7, when the auto controls failed during reentry and he had to land it manually.

How many hours did Oklahoma astronaut Leroy "Gordo" Cooper, Jr. spend in space?