Scott Carpenter 1925 - 2013 RIP

The pioneer American astronaut Scott Carpenter has died at the age of 88.

Malcolm Scott Carpenter was one of the original "Mercury 7" astronauts and the fourth American in space. He had originally been scheduled to be the fifth, but was moved up the roster when Deke Slayton was grounded after being diagnosed with a heart murmur.

His entire life was both colourful and controversial. For some reason still unclear to this day he missed his final exam (in "heat transfer") at the University of Colorado and so did not qualify for his degree in Aeronautical Engineering.

He served in the Navy at the tail end of World War II and in 1949 was recruited by a specialist Naval Reconnaissance Unit where he flew secret missions along the coasts of Korea, China and Japan.

His 1962 flight in Mercury Aurora 7 ended with him splashing down safely but 250 miles off course and it was three hours before he was picked up. The cause was linked to everything from a problem with overconsumption of fuel affecting the retro-rockets to a fault with the pitch scanner system. However, despite the mission being officially being described by NASA as "the most successful to date", rumours circulated that Carpenter had been responsible for the overshoot himself. Even Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan later wrote: "But he screwed up his own Mercury flight by joyriding, not paying enough attention to the job, missing his retrofire cue and splashing down several hundred miles from the target area. It became pretty obvious that Scott would never fly in space again.”

The fact that he never flew in space again and left NASA in 1967 was for many years held up as giving support to this theory, but as with all good urban legends, the truth should never spoil a good story, as it was not until later spaceflights that a number of hardware problems were discovered that had not been known at the time and showed that Carpenter had almost certainly been blameless.

The reason Carpenter never flew again was because in 1964 he badly injured his left arm in a motorcycle accident whilst on secondment to a naval underwater unit in Bermuda. Despite two operations he could not get anywhere near full mobility back in the arm and had to be stood down from the astronaut group on medical grounds.

However, the University of Colorado decided to award him his degree almost twenty years late, on the grounds that "his astronaut training more than compensated for what he needed to know about heat transfer".

After NASA he founded Sea Sciences Inc, a Corporation aimed at developing underwater resources.

His "work hard, play hard" image continued. He was often featured in the popular press and on TV, usually accompanied by a fast car or an even faster woman, for a while was one of the organisers of the Paris-Dakar Rally, was a consultant to sport and diving equipment manufacturers and was married and divorced three times, the marriages producing a total of seven children (his second wife was the daughter of Hal Roach, who produced the Laurel and Hardy films).

Carpenter always had the reputation of having astonishing physical fitness (his arm injury only preventing the sky-high requirements to be an astronaut), and until suffering a recent stroke could still be seen on the ski-slopes in Vail, near his home in Colorado. He died in a hospice in Denver and his death means that John Glenn (who was 92 in July) is the only surviving member of the "Mercury 7".



Scott Carpenter in his Mercury Spacesuit
(photo is copyright NASA but may be freely used for non-commercial purposes under NASA's public domain policy if acknowledged)