Scott Carpenter recalls early space mission on USS Intrepid
— -- Fifty years after he was plucked from the Atlantic Ocean and deposited on the deck of the USS Intrepid, pioneering astronaut Scott Carpenter marked the anniversary of his three orbits of Earth and tense re-entry with a return to the ship that brought him to safety.
"I've got a soft spot in my heart for that ship," says Carpenter, 87, a former Navy test pilot who became one of the original seven Project Mercury astronauts and the second American to orbit the planet.
The aircraft carrier, like Carpenter, is in its retirement years, and it was the scene Thursday of a ceremony recalling Carpenter's almost five-hour flight. The ship is now a military museum at a dock in New York City.
Carpenter's Aurora 7 mission came three months after John Glenn's first American orbital flight as the United States pursued the Soviet Union in the Cold War race to outer space. Carpenter's flight is most remembered for the drama-filled re-entry, when his tiny space capsule overshot its target by 250 miles.
The expected communications blackout as the capsule re-entered the atmosphere lasted nine minutes, more than twice the length of Glenn's blackout period. The worried nation waited tensely for word of his fate, and President Kennedy's White House kept an open phone line to NASA's mission headquarters.
After splashing down, Carpenter was afloat beyond line-of-sight radio communications. NASA waited 40 minutes before announcing to the world that Carpenter was alive. He climbed out of his capsule and waited in a raft for a helicopter to hoist him out of the sea.
"I was alone, but I didn't worry about that," Carpenter said in a recent interview. "My mind was busy reviewing that marvelous and recent experience."
His flight of just under five hours was so much fun, he said, "I got a little tired of having to talk to the ground (mission control) so much."
"I was very happy to see that it all ended successfully," Carpenter said. "It got the United States back in the space race. We were tied with the Soviet Union, and that was important."
Carpenter and Glenn are the only survivors among the original seven U.S. astronauts, and neither Carpenter's flight nor name are as well remembered as those of Glenn, who later served as U.S. senator from Ohio and celebrated the 50th anniversary of his flight on Feb. 12.
"I know that first flights get the attention, but each flight builds on the one before it," Glenn, 90, said in recent interview. "That's the way we make progress."
Carpenter and Glenn worked closely together — Carpenter was Glenn's backup, meaning he was both understudy and alter-ego, Glenn recalled, before getting his own ride on the next mission. "Scott did a marvelous job for me," Glenn said.
One of the most memorable quotations of the early space age was Carpenter's words broadcast around the world from mission control during the final seconds before Glenn's blast off: "Godspeed, John Glenn."
Besides asking for divine help, Carpenter was praying for speed: The two previous NASA flights had been suborbital, and to circle the planet the launch rocket needed to obtain orbital velocity, more than 17,500 miles an hour.
"It came straight from the heart," Carpenter said. "What John needed sitting on that rocket ready to ride was speed, more than any of his predecessors had had. … It had special meaning. It was appropriate.''
The ceremony was among several marking Carpenter's anniversary over several days. He was being honored by Swiss watchmaker Breitling, which built a special 24-hour watch Carpenter wore on his orbital flight and later produced a Scott Carpenter special edition Cosmonaute timepiece.
Susan Marenoff-Zausner, president of the Intrepid museum, says ship lore has it that once his initial debriefing and doctor's exam were conducted, Carpenter sat down to a dinner of two steaks, prepared by the Intrepid crew.
"It was kind of exciting," recalls John Olivera, 71, a retired New Jersey police officer who was a seaman on the Intrepid then. "He was whisked away quickly''
For Carpenter and Glenn, the end of the space shuttle program is an unhappy development. Glenn says "we've gotten ourselves into a lousy situation," relying on the Russians to transport American astronauts to the International Space Station. Carpenter left NASA after his flight and explored under the ocean as part of the Navy's SEALAB program.
"Failure to explore space is a failure of global importance," Carpenter says. "It's not a Russian effort, not a Chinese effort, not an American effort to explore space. It's an effort for humanity. And if we back off and don't investigate our location in the solar system, it's a loss felt globally."