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Malcolm Scott Carpenter
NASA Astronaut
Nationality	American
Status	Retired
Born	May 1, 1925 (1925-05-01) (age 82) Boulder, Colorado
Other occupation	Test Pilot
Space time	4 hours, 56 minutes
Selection	1959 NASA Group
Missions	Mercury-Atlas 7
Mission insignia

Malcolm Scott Carpenter was one of the original seven astronauts selected in 1959 for Project Mercury. Created by the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Project Mercury was the United States' answer to the Soviet Union's space program. This rivalry eventually became the space race — a contest between the two superpowers to land the first men on the moon and return them safely to earth.

Carpenter was the second American to orbit the earth and the fourth American in space, following Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn.

Born in Boulder, Colorado, Carpenter moved to New York City with his parents (Marion Scott Carpenter and Florence [née Noxon] Carpenter) for the first two years of his life. (His father had been awarded a postdoctoral research post at Columbia University.) In the summer of 1927, young Carpenter returned to Boulder with his mother, then ill with tuberculosis. There he was raised by his maternal grandparents in the family home at the corner of Aurora Avenue and Seventh Street. He lived in Boulder until his graduation from Boulder High School in the class of 1943.

Upon graduation, he was accepted into the V-12 Navy College Training Program as an aviation cadet (V-12a), where he trained until the end of World War II. He returned to Boulder in November 1945 to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. At the end of his senior year, he missed the final examination in heat transfer, leaving him one requirement short of a degree. After his single Mercury flight, the University granted him the degree on grounds that, "His subsequent training as an Astronaut has more than made up for the deficiency in the subject of heat transfer." ^[1]

On the eve of the Korean war, Carpenter was recruited by the USN's Direct Procurement Program (DPP), and reported to Pensacola Naval Air Station (N.A.S.) in the fall of 1949 for Pre-flight and Primary flight training. He earned his wings on April 19, 1951, in Corpus Christi, Texas. During his first tour of duty, on his first deployment, Carpenter flew Lockheed P2V Neptunes for Patrol Squadron Six on reconnaissance and ASW (anti-submarine warfare) missions during the Korean War. Forward-based in Adak, Carpenter then flew surveillance missions along the Soviet and Chinese coasts during his second deployment; designated as PPC (patrol plane commander) for his third deployment, Lt. (j.g.) Carpenter was based with his squadron in Guam.

Carpenter was then appointed to the United States Naval Test Pilot School, class 13, at Patuxent River N.A.S. in 1954. He continued at Patuxent until 1957, working as a test pilot in the Electronics Test Division; his next tour of duty was spent in Monterey, California, at the Navy Line School. In 1958, Carpenter was named Air Intelligence Officer for the USS Hornet.

Carpenter inspects the honeycomb protective material on the main pressure bulkhead of his Aurora 7 capsule

After being chosen for Project Mercury in 1959, Carpenter served as backup pilot for John Glenn, who flew the first U.S. orbital mission aboard Friendship 7; when Deke Slayton was withdrawn on medical grounds from Project Mercury's second manned orbital flight, Carpenter was assigned to replace him. He flew into space on May 24, 1962, atop the Mercury-Atlas 7 rocket for a three-orbit science mission that lasted nearly five hours. His Aurora 7 spacecraft attained a maximum altitude of 164 miles and an orbital velocity of 17,532 miles per hour.

Carpenter in a water egress training exercise before his Mercury Atlas 7 mission.

Working through five onboard experiments, Carpenter helped among other things to identify the mysterious 'fire fly' particles of frozen liquid around the craft, first observed by John Glenn. Carpenter was the first American astronaut to eat solid food in space. A balky control stick, redesigned with Carpenter's input for later Mercury missions, meant that fuel consumption was a problem throughout his flight. A malfunctioning pitch horizon scanner (a component of the automatic control system), at retrofire, forced Carpenter to manually control his reentry ("The malfunction of the pitch horizon scanner circuit dictated that the pilot manually control the spacecraft attitudes during this event."^[2]); a misalignment in yaw and decelerating thrusters (another malfunction) resulted in a 250-mile overshoot. The delay caused by the automatic sequencer meant that Carpenter had to fire the retrorockets manually. This took two pushes of the over-ride button and accounted for 15 to 20 miles of the overshoot. The loss of thrust in the ripple pattern of the retros added another 60 miles. Firing some 25 degrees off to the right in the yaw attitude of the capsule accounts for the remaining 170 miles. Carpenter was located in his life raft, safe and in good health, forty minutes after splashdown by Major Fred Brown, under the command of the Puerto Rico Air National Guard^[3], and recovered three hours later by the USS Intrepid.

Postflight analysis described the PHS malfunction as "mission critical," but noted that the pilot "adequately compensated" for "this anomaly . . . in subsequent inflight procedures."^[4], confirming that that backup systems—human pilots—could succeed when automatic systems fail.[1] Some 21st-century memoirs ^[5] revived the simmering controversy over who, exactly, was to blame for the overshoot, charging, for example, that Carpenter was distracted by science experiments and the fireflies phenomenon. Others note that fuel consumption and other aspects of the vehicle operation were as much, if not more, the responsibility of the ground controllers, that hardware malfunctions went unidentified, and that organizational tensions between the astronaut office and the flight controller office — tensions that NASA did not resolve until the later Gemini and Apollo programs — may account for much of the latter-day criticism of Carpenter's performance during his flight.

Nevertheless, after Carpenter's troubled Mercury mission, head of flight operations Christopher Kraft wrote he "swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never again fly in space. ... He didn't."^[6] Carpenter, in turn, responds at length and in detail to the criticism of his spaceflight in his 2003 autobiography.

In July 1964, in Bermuda, Carpenter sustained a grounding injury from a motorbike accident while on leave from NASA to train for the Navy's SEALAB project. In 1965, for Sealab II, he spent 28 days living on the ocean floor off the coast of California. He returned to work at NASA as Executive Assistant to the Director of the Manned Spaceflight Center, then returned to the Navy's Deep Submergence Systems Project in 1967, based in Bethesda, Maryland, as a Director of Aquanaut Operations for Sealab III. Carpenter retired from the Navy in 1969, after which he founded Sea Sciences, Inc., a corporation for developing programs for utilizing ocean resources and improving environmental health.

In 1962, Scott Carpenter Park in Boulder, Colorado, was named in his honor. In the 1983 film, The Right Stuff, Carpenter was played by Charles Frank. Although his appearance was relatively minor, the film played up Carpenter's friendship with John Glenn, as played by Ed Harris.

1. ^ For Spacious Skies, (hardcover ed.), p. 97.
2. ^ Results of the Second United States Manned Orbital Spaceflight, NASA SP-6, p. 66.
3. ^ Sgt. Ramon Alonso, ed. Puerto Rico Air National Guard: Forty Five Years of History 1947-1992. Centro Grafico del Caribe Inc., 1993.
4. ^ Results of the Second United States Manned Orbital Spaceflight, NASA SP-6, p. 1.
5. ^ Chris Kraft, Flight: My Life in Mission Control (New York: Dutton, 2001)
6. ^ Kraft, Flight, p. 170.

• For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut, ISBN 0-15-100467-6 or the revised paperback edition ISBN 0-451-21105-7, Carpenter's biography, co-written with his daughter; describes his childhood, his experiences as a naval aviator, a Mercury astronaut, including an account of what went wrong, and right, on the flight of Aurora 7.

• The Official Website of Scott Carpenter
• NASA Biography
• Spacefacts biography of Scott Carpenter