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Malcolm Scott Carpenter (born May 1, 1925) was one
of the original seven The_Mercury_Seven|Mercury
astronauts for Project Mercury, chosen in 1959 to
lead United States|America in its race to beat the
Russia|Russians to the moon. He was the second
American to orbit, and the fourth in space.

He was born in Boulder, Colorado, where he lived
until he graduated from Boulder High School in
1943. After his graduation, he joined the U.S.
Navy as an aviation cadet, where he served until
the end of World War II. He returned to Boulder to
study aeronautical engineering at the University
Of Colorado. In 1949, however, he flunked his heat
transfer final, the only course left before his
graduation with a bachelor of science 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.")

Carpenter rejoined the Navy in 1949, earning his
wings in 1951. During his first tour of duty,
Carpenter flew P2V Neptune patrol planes on
surveillance missions during the Korean War.
Afterward, he was assigned to the Navy Test Pilot
School in Patuxent River in 1954. After Test Pilot
School, he worked as a test pilot in the
Electronics Test Division, and was later assigned
as Air Intelligence Officer on the USS Hornet
(CV-12)|USS Hornet.

After being chosen for Project Mercury in 1959,
Carpenter was named 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Friendship 7; when Deke Slayton was withdrawn on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 the second manned orbital
flight of Project Mercury, Carpenter was assigned
to replace him. Carpenter flew into space on May
24, 1962, atop the Mercury_7 | 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, which
had been observed by John Glenn during the
previous Mercury flight. 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. And a
malfunctioning automatic control system, at
retrofire, required Carpenter to manually control
his reentry, resulting in a 250-mile overshoot. He
was located in his life raft, safe and in good
health, forty minutes after splashdown.

Just who was to blame for the overshoot is a
matter of some dispute.  Chris Kraft, who led the
team of flight controllers, seems to squarely
blame Carpenter, a position taken up by others in
the flight controller community such as Gene
Kranz. On the other hand, monitoring fuel
consumption and other aspects of the vehicle
operation was as much, if not more, the
responsibility of the ground controllers as the
astronaut, and organizational tensions between the
astronaut office and the flight controller office,
which weren't resolved until the later
Project_Gemini|Gemini and Apollo programs, may be
reflected in Kraft's assessment of Carpenter's
performance during the flight. Carpenter responds
to the criticism in his 2003 biography.

In July 1964, 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
11, 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,
as a Director of Aquanaut Operations. Carpenter
retired from the Navy in 1969, after which he
founded Sea Sciences, Inc., a corporation for
developing programs for utilizing ocean resources
and improved environmental health.

In 1962, Scott Carpenter Park in Boulder, Colorado
was named in his honor.

==Books==
*For Spacious Skies, ISBN 0151004676 or the
revised paperback edition ISBN 0451211057 -
Carpenter's memoirs co-written with his daughter;
provides a first-hand account of his experiences
as a pilot, a Mercury Astronaut, and his life
after Mercury, including an account of what went
wrong, and right, on the Aurora 7 spaceflight

==External Links==
*http://www11.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/carpenter
-ms.html NASA Biography