The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

From 1957 to 1959 Carpenter attended the Navy General Line School and the Navy Air Intelligence School and was then assigned as Air Intelligence Officer to the aircraft carrier, USS Hornet. In April 1959 he was selected as one of the original seven Mercury Astronauts.

Robert B. Voas was a US Navy psychologist posted to NASA, whose first job was to select suitable men for space duty. Warren North was chief of manned space flight. At an early briefing North confirmed that the potential spacemen would be chosen from pilots:

They would monitor and adjust the cabin environment. They would operate the communications system. They would make physiological, astronomical, and meteorological observations that could not be made by instruments. Most important, they would be able to operate the reaction controls in space and be capable of initiating descent from orbit. This was the key part, that the astronaut could take over control of the spacecraft itself.

Carpenter endured 30 hours of tests at the Lovelace & Wright-Patterson Centre in 1959.

The chosen seven had shown emotional maturity, engineering, flight experience and motivation. Eighteen others were unreservedly recommended.

On 27 April 1959 they began work at Langley Air Force Base. NASA was considering 10 flights carrying chimpanzees but this changed on 12 April 1961. The Soviets made the first manned flight. Shepard followed on 5 May 1961. On 25 May President Kennedy presented his vision to Congress.

A couple of weeks later, Gilruth and Webb were aboard one of NASA’s R4Ds when over the radio the president was addressing Congress, pledging NASA to a lunar expedition. Gilruth was “aghast.” He looked at Webb, who knew all about it. In his special message to Congress, delivered on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy set out his vision on a number of “urgent national needs,” one of them the conquest of space. In a resonant call to arms, the president asked the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” No other space project, Kennedy declared, would be “more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”

Glenn’s flight had been launched by the Mercury Atlas 6 (MA-6) which carried 122 tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen, more than four times the fuel load of the Redstone rockets which had powered Shepard and Grissom’s sub-orbital flights. Scott Carpenter had been the back-up to Glenn, who had left the face plate of his helmet open on re-entry. At the formal inquiry he was cleared of the charge of panicking. Deke Slayton was scheduled to make the next orbital flight but during a G force test in August 1959 it had been noticed that his heartbeat was erratic. In January 1962 an Airforce cardiologist recommended that he should be grounded and Carpenter was given the next flight, designated MA-7. Carpenter named his capsule Aurora 7.

Carpenter’s daughter, Kris Stoever, was six years old at the time and later helped her father write his account. Carpenter’s wife’s name was Rene. Kris Stoever: