Scott Carpenter
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| Astronaut | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Born | May 1, 1925 Boulder, Colorado |
| Occupation1 | Test Pilot |
| Space time | 4 hours, 56 minutes |
| Selection | 1959 NASA Group |
| Mission(s) | Mercury Atlas 7 |
| Mission insignia |  |
| This infobox needs updating. Please see Template talk:Infobox Astronaut for information | |
| 1 previous or current | |
Malcolm Scott Carpenter (born May 1, 1925) 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.
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[edit] Early life
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.
[edit] Naval aviator
Upon graduation, he was accepted into the U.S. Navy's aviation cadet program (V12a), where he served 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 on 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; promoted to 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.
[edit] Project Mercury
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.
Working through a jammed flight plan and 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 for later Mercury missions, meant that fuel consumption was a problem throughout his flight. A malfunctioning automatic control system, at retrofire, forced Carpenter to manually control his reentry; a misalignment in yaw and decelerating thrusters (another malfunction) resulted in a 250-mile overshoot. Carpenter was located in his life raft, safe and in good health, forty minutes after splashdown, and recovered by the USS Intrepid.
Just who was to blame for the overshoot is a matter of dispute. On the one hand, Chris Kraft, leader of the team of flight controllers at the Cape, argues in a hard-hitting memoir[2] that Carpenter was to blame. Kraft's position is taken up with less enthusiasm by others in the flight controller community (see, for example, Gene Kranz). Yet at the time, the mission was considered a resounding success, in large part because the flight of Aurora 7 confirmed that backup systems—human pilots—could succeed when automatic systems fail.[1] 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 criticism of Carpenter's performance during his flight.
Carpenter responds at length and in detail to the criticism of his spaceflight in his 2003 autobiography.
[edit] Ocean research
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; he never flew in space again. 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.
[edit] References
[edit] Books
- 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.
