Scott Carpenter

Scott Carpenter's mother had tuberculosis, and the family shuttled him between New York and Boulder, Colorado, before he settled in for good with his maternal grandparents at around age two. He played clarinet and cheered from the sidelines at Boulder High School, nothing that predicted a life above the atmosphere. Pearl Harbor changed that: he joined the Navy's aviation cadet program in 1943, then went back to the University of Colorado for aeronautical engineering — and missed graduating by one exam, because a washed-out bridge kept him from his heat-transfer final. He was commissioned anyway in 1949 and spent the Korean War and the years after flying low, dangerous reconnaissance runs along the Soviet and Chinese coastlines before test-pilot school pulled him toward something faster.

NASA picked Carpenter as one of the Mercury Seven in April 1959, and he flew as John Glenn's backup before getting his own flight, Mercury-Atlas 7, on May 24, 1962 — the second American to orbit Earth. A faulty pitch horizon scanner burned through his fuel and forced a manual reentry that put him down 250 miles past his target; for nearly three hours nobody quite knew if he had survived, and Walter Cronkite said so on the air. He never flew in space again. Instead he took NASA leave to join the Navy's SEALAB program, inspired by a meeting with Jacques Cousteau, and in 1965 spent 28 days living at 205 feet on the ocean floor, radio-linked to an astronaut orbiting overhead. A motorcycle crash and the joint damage from repeated deep dives ended his flying career.

NASA's own flight director never quite forgave him for it. Chris Kraft believed Carpenter fell behind on his checklist during the flight, distracted by details outside the window instead of managing fuel, and said so publicly for years afterward. Whether the fault was Carpenter's piloting or the scanner's mechanical failure was argued for decades and was never cleanly settled either way, but the judgment stuck: no other Mercury flight was ever assigned to him, and his name appears only as backup crew on the missions that followed. His personal life ran through four marriages — his first, to Rene Price, produced five of his seven children and ended in divorce in 1972, the same decade the space career that defined him also effectively ended.

Carpenter left NASA in 1967 and the Navy two years later, then spent his working life consulting on diving equipment and space themes for film, and writing — two technothrillers and, in 2003, a memoir written with his daughter Kris Stoever. He died in Denver in October 2013, at 88, after a stroke. Boulder built a park in his name with a climbable 25-foot rocket; the International Space Hall of Fame inducted him in 1981 and the National Aviation Hall of Fame followed in 2017. What outlasted the controversy is a single line, 'Godspeed, John Glenn,' used to send off his friend at launch, later borrowed by a Star Trek film and a Kenny G record.

Scott Carpenter's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Mercury-Atlas 7 (Aurora 7) mission
  Second American orbital spaceflight 1962
• SEALAB II mission
  28 days at 205 feet off La Jolla, California 1965
• Astronaut Scholarship Foundation company
  Co-founded with the surviving Mercury Seven 1984
• The Steel Albatross book
  Techno-thriller novel 1991
• For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut book
  Memoir co-written with his daughter, Kris Stoever 2003

• May 1, 1925 aged 0 Born in Boulder, Colorado
• 1943 aged ~18 Joins the Navy's V-5 aviation cadet program Inspired by Pearl Harbor.
• 1949 aged ~24 Commissioned as a naval aviator
• April 9, 1959 aged 33 Named one of the Mercury Seven astronauts
• May 24, 1962 aged 37 Flies Aurora 7, becoming the second American to orbit Earth Overshot the planned splashdown by 250 miles after a scanner malfunction.
• 1965 aged ~40 Spends 28 days on the ocean floor during SEALAB II
• August 3, 1967 aged 42 Resigns from NASA
• 1969 aged ~44 Retires from the Navy as a commander
• October 10, 2013 aged 88 Dies in Denver after a stroke

• Wernher von Braun 1912–1977
  German-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon. engineered the rockets that carried the program he flew in
• Walter Cronkite 1916–2009
  CBS Evening News anchor known as the most trusted man in America during a pivotal era of broadcast journalism. narrated the anxious splashdown of
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. flew the mission under the presidency of
• Chuck Yeager 1923–2020
  Air Force test pilot who first exceeded the speed of sound in level flight in 1947. dismissed the astronaut corps as glorified passengers