We are slowly losing the people who made us once great. Go with God, Scott. Your flight help pave the way to the stars.
This leaves only John Glenn as the final surviving member of the Mercury Seven.
I love Scott Carpenter though - he was apparently an amazing athlete and at the same time a poet. He was described as a man who followed the beat of his own drummer.
While early pictures don’t do his wife (well, first wife) any justice, Rene was considered the most lively off the early astronaut wives and was apparently JFK’s personal favorite.
Scott didn’t fly a perfect mission on his Mercury flight - he took on too many side projects and he wasted a lot of time and fuel and ignored instructions from the ground. As a result he was banned by Mission Control to fly any more missions but I’m not sure that really phased him. Been there done that. He’s definitely an interesting character though and the world is less without him in it.
My dad was a Lieutenant on the aircraft carrier USS Hornet - he got to pull out and park the aircraft carrier 
For a brief period, Scott Carpenter was stationed on the Hornet - apparently something he needed to check off his list during his transition over to the Mercury Program. My dad was totally starstruck - said that Carpenter was the most impressive man he ever met - and I got named after him as a result.
He was a Boulder native, and Scott Carpenter Park here has a terrific rocket ship play structure that is thrillingly tall for the intended audience of elementary school kids (who occasionally need parental rescuing from the tippy-top).
RIP.
I was just thinking the other day that Carpenter and Glenn were the last of the Mercury astronauts.
Lord, guard and guide the men who fly
Through the great spaces in the sky,
Be with them always in the air,
In dark’ning storms or sunlight fair.
O, Hear us when we lift our prayer,
For those in peril in the air.
Pioneered in space exploration AND in exploration of the ocean floor.
An age of extraordinary people passes, as all ages do. May they be ever remembered.
Not quite accurate. According to Wikipedia, his mission was considered a success. His problems during the flight resulted from a breakdown in a piece of equipment called the pitch horizon scanner, which caused him to take manual control of his re-entry.
Chris Kraft, the NASA flight director called the mission “the most successful to date; everything had gone perfectly except for some overexpenditure of fuel.” NASA later reported that Carpenter had “exercised his manual controls with ease in a number of [required] spacecraft maneuvers and had made numerous and valuable observations in the interest of space science.”
Carpenter wasn’t banned from further spaceflight due to his performance during the mission. He took a leave of absence from NASA to participate in the Navy’s SEALAB program. While on leave, he had a motorcycle accident which injured his left arm and forced him to be grounded for medical reasons. He had two surgeries to his arm, in 1964 and 1967, but was unable to regain sufficient mobility, and was finally ruled medically ineligible to fly.
RIP, Scott. Another giant down. 
Godspeed, Scott Carpenter.
No. Frazzled had it right the first time. Read Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff”, Gene Kranz’s “Failure is Not an Option”, and Deke Slayton’s “Deke”. Carpenter burned up so much fuel in the automatic maneuvering system that the automatic re-entry system couldn’t work so he had to do it manually. And there wasn’t much left in the manual system either. And even then, when he was supposed to be positioned to fire the retros, he moved the capsule around to sight see some more. He was late firing the retro rockets and wasn’t positioned properly when he did finally fire them. Several sources report that after Carpenter was picked up by a Navy helicopter Flight Director firmly stated in mission control “That son of a bitch will NEVER fly for me again.” Banned? Okay, he wasn’t banned. He just wasn’t going to ever be assigned to another mission. It was a scheduling issue is all. :rolleyes:
Sad, sad news. The heroes of my long-ago childhood are becoming fewer and fewer. Godspeed, Mr. Carpenter.
I can think of no better tribute than this:
- Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air…
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.*
High Flight -
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
I had read that “The Right Stuff” had a bit of exaggerations, i.e., the Gus Grissom thing. Grissom allegedly screwed the pooch, yet, he was rescheduled to take on a larger mission with NASA. Ergo, I’m going to take Wolfe’s book with a grain of salt.
Yes, Slayton wrote that he thought Wolfe carried the Grissom thing too much also. I guess that episode stuck in Wolfe’s mind more than where Glenn’s, Schirra’s, and Cooper’s flights proved that Grissom didn’t blow the hatch, however much it might have seemed just after Gus’s flight. I suspect Wolfe’s main source for that part of his book was Betty Grissom.
Ranger Jeff and I have read the same books with regard to the early space program. It’s a fascinating period. None of the astronaut books agree with Tom Wolfe’s characterization of Gus Grissom “screwing the pooch” but every book that tells the behind the scenes story and includes Mercury tells the same story of Carpenters flight.
In any case, my favorite television documentary of those days is called Moon Shot and is entirely available on Youtube: - YouTube. I strongly recommend watching the entire video. But if you jump to 55 minutes you can hear Carpenter tell the story himself in his own words.
Frazzled, have you seen the mini-series “From The Earth To The Moon”? It’s a Ron Howard/Tom Hanks production for HBO. I expect you’d enjoy it.
There’s a big difference between the accounts of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs that were written while the people were still in NASA and the ones written after they retired.
Frazzled, I have a question for you. You’ve read the books I have and probably have seen “The Right Stuff” too. I wonder if NASA Admin Webb’s successful campaign to have Slayton grounded was a response to the show of “Astropower” vis a vis the LBJ, Annie Glenn incident where Webb threatened to take Glenn off the Friendship 7 flight and the other pilots (who were there and overheard it) asked “Then who are you going to get to fly it?”
From the Earth to the Moon is a great series! I especially like the episodes where they build the LEM, and the Apollo 15 mission where they find the origin rock.
I don’t think there was any malice in grounding Deke. Remember Mercury was our first baby steps into space. We really didn’t know the extent man, and our machines, could work in space. The selection criteria for Mercury astronauts included that they had to be in prime physical condition. While he was training for his mission his doctors discovered that he had a heart murmur. It wasn’t serious but it was enough that the doctors got cold feet and refused to sign off on him.
And finally the grounding ended up being fortuitous for Deke. The result of the display of “astro power” was that NASA recognized that the astronauts needed their own representative in the administration. Deke was given a promotion to the head of that new department and became a well respected and very effective astro boss. He finally got to fly on the Apollo Soyuz mission.