Scott Carpenter, 1925–2013

When Scott Carpenter’s capsule splashed down in the Caribbean on May 24, 1962, NASA didn’t know if the astronaut was alive or dead. The craft had been low on fuel as it re-entered the atmosphere, and a key instrument that indicated which way the capsule was pointing had malfunctioned. NASA’s mission control told Carpenter he would overshoot his landing zone by more than 250 miles, and then abruptly lost radio contact. Veteran broadcaster Walter Cronkite solemnly reported on CBS News that America may have “lost an astronaut.” But as it turned out, there was no need for panic. Carpenter, always cool under pressure—his heart rate never went above 105 during his almost five-hour spaceflight—had taken manual control of the craft and landed safely in the waters off Puerto Rico. When a Navy helicopter spotted him, he had his feet up in a life raft and was eating a candy bar. Whisked aboard the aircraft carrier Intrepid, Carpenter received a phone call from President Kennedy, who congratulated him on being the second American to orbit Earth. The astronaut humbly apologized “for not having aimed a little bit better on re-entry.”

Born in Boulder, Carpenter “had a tough childhood,” said the Los Angeles Times. His parents separated when he was 3, and he was largely raised by his grandfather, a local newspaper editor. In 1939, his grandfather died, “and Carpenter, all of 14 years old, was more or less on his own.” He became a troublemaker. “The local papers that say I was just a normal boy are trying to think of something good to say,” he told Life in 1962. “I stole things from stores, and I was just drifting through, sort of no-good.” But after twice flunking out of the University of Colorado and spending a brief stint in the hospital following a high-speed car crash, he decided to turn his life around. “He returned to college and studied hard. Three years later, he was a Navy pilot.”

Carpenter flew anti-submarine patrols and surveillance sorties during the Korean War, said Bloomberg.com, and in the late 1950s he applied for Project Mercury—the first U.S. human spaceflight program. “I volunteered for this project for a lot of reasons,” he said after being selected along with six other pilots in 1959. “One of them, quite frankly, is that it is a chance for immortality.” Carpenter uttered the famous line, “Godspeed, John Glenn,” when astronaut Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth on Feb. 20, 1962. Three months after that, it was Carpenter’s turn.

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He blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., “raced to an altitude of 165 miles, and circled the planet at 17,500 miles per hour,” said The Washington Post. “He was enjoying himself,” author Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff, his account of the Mercury project. “He talked more, ate more, drank more water, and did more with the capsule than any of them ever had. He was swinging the capsule this way and that way, taking photographs a mile a minute, making detailed observations of the sunrises and horizon.” While his re-entry was troubled, a NASA investigation officially exonerated him of any pilot error. But Mercury flight director Chris Kraft insisted that Carpenter’s lack of discipline had caused the overshoot. “He was completely ignoring our request to check his instruments,” Kraft wrote in his 2001 memoir. “I swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never again fly in space. He didn’t.”

Having done what he could in outer space, Carpenter became “a pioneer in the ocean’s depths,” said The New York Times. He descended 200 feet to the ocean floor off San Diego in 1965 to inaugurate the Navy’s Man-in-the-Sea program by living in an undersea habitat called Sealab II. Together with three other men, he stayed for 30 days, mining ore from the ocean floor, harvesting fish, and even salvaging a sunken fighter jet. After retiring from the Navy in 1969, Carpenter continued seeking new adventures. He set up a company devoted to oceanographic research and dived in most of the world’s oceans, including under the Arctic ice. “Every child has got to seek his own destiny,” he said. “All I can say is that I have had a great time seeking my own.”