Malcolm Scott Carpenter (May 1, 1925 – October 10, 2013) was an American naval officer and aviator, test pilot, aeronautical engineer, astronaut, and aquanaut. He was one of the Mercury Seven astronauts selected for NASA's Project Mercury in April 1959. Carpenter was the second American (after John Glenn) to orbit the Earth and the fourth American in space, after Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and Glenn.
Commissioned into the U.S. Navy in 1949, Carpenter became a naval aviator, flying a Lockheed P-2 Neptune with Patrol Squadron 6 (VP-6) on reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare missions along the coasts of the Soviet Union and China during the Korean War and the Cold War. In 1954, he attended the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, and became a test pilot. In 1958, he was named Air Intelligence Officer of USS Hornet, which was then in dry dock at the Bremerton Navy Yard.
The following year, Carpenter was selected as one of the Mercury Seven astronauts. He was backup to Glenn during the latter's Mercury Atlas 6 orbital mission. Carpenter flew the next mission, Mercury Atlas 7, in the spacecraft he named Aurora 7. Due to a series of malfunctions, the spacecraft landed 250 miles (400 km) downrange from its intended splashdown point, but both pilot and spacecraft were retrieved.
In 1964, Carpenter obtained permission from NASA to take a leave of absence to join the U.S. Navy SEALAB project as an aquanaut. During training he suffered injuries that grounded him, making him unavailable for further spaceflights. In 1965, he spent 28 days living on the ocean floor off the coast of California as part of SEALAB II. He returned to NASA as Executive Assistant to the Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, then joined the Navy's Deep Submergence Systems Project in 1967 as Director of Aquanaut Operations for SEALAB III. He retired from NASA in 1967 and the Navy in 1969, with the rank of commander.
Carpenter became a consultant to sport and diving manufacturers, and to the film industry on space flight and oceanography. He gave talks and appeared in television documentaries. He was involved in projects related to biological pest control and waste disposal, and for the production of energy from industrial and agricultural wastes. He appeared in television commercials and wrote a pair of technothrillers and an autobiography, For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut, co-written with his daughter, Kristen Stoever.
Malcolm Scott Carpenter was born on May 1, 1925, in Boulder, Colorado, the son of Dr. Marion Scott Carpenter (1901–1973), a research chemist, and Florence Kelso (née Noxon, known in her family as "Toye"; 1900–1962). Carpenter, known in his childhood as Bud or Buddy, moved with his parents to New York City, where his father had been awarded a postdoctoral research post at Columbia University, in 1925.
In the summer of 1927, Carpenter's mother, who was ill with tuberculosis, returned to Boulder, taking him with her. (In those days, mountain air was believed to aid recovery). Her condition deteriorated, and she entered the Mesa Vista Sanatorium in 1930. She recovered sufficiently to become chief medical librarian at Boulder Community Hospital in 1945. Carpenter's father remained in New York, but found it hard to find work during the Great Depression. Eventually his father secured a good position at Givaudan. Carpenter's parents divorced in 1945, and his father remarried.
Carpenter lived with his maternal grandparents in the family home at the corner of Aurora Avenue and Seventh Street. He later denied naming his spacecraft Aurora 7 after Aurora Avenue. He was educated at University Hill Elementary School in Boulder and Boulder High School, where he played the clarinet, was a cheerleader, and served on the editorial board of the student newspaper. He was a Boy Scout, and earned the rank of Second Class Scout.
Like many teenagers in Boulder, Carpenter was deeply affected by the attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into World War II, and he resolved to become a naval aviator. On February 12, 1943, he went to the U.S. Navy's recruiting office at Lowry Field near Denver and applied to join the Navy's V-5 Aviation Cadet Training Program. After obtaining his father's permission, he traveled to the headquarters of the 12th Naval District in San Francisco, where he passed physical and written examinations, and was accepted for training as an aviation cadet on April 11.
The Navy had a large number of potential aviators in the pipeline at this time, so to retain young men like Carpenter, the V-12 Navy College Training Program was created, whereby cadets attended college until training positions became available. When Carpenter graduated from high school in 1943, he became a V-12A aviation cadet at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Three semesters there were followed by six months of preflight training at Saint Mary's College of California in Moraga, California, and primary flight training at Ottumwa, Iowa, in a Stearman N2S for four months. The war ended before he finished training, so the Navy released him from active duty in September 1945.
After visiting his father and stepmother in New York, Carpenter returned to Boulder in November 1945 to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Colorado. He was given credit for his previous study, and entered as a junior. While there he joined Delta Tau Delta International Fraternity. He was severely injured in a car accident on September 14, 1946, after he fell asleep at the wheel of his 1934 Ford. The car went over a cliff and overturned. At the end of his senior year, he missed his final examination in heat transfer; a washed-out bridge prevented him from getting to class. This left him one requirement short of a degree.
Carpenter met Rene Louise Price, a fellow student at the University of Colorado, where she studied history and music at the campus bookstore, where she worked part-time. She was a member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority. Her parents had also separated when she was young, and her mother too suffered from tuberculosis. They were married at St. John's Episcopal Church in Boulder in September 1948.
Plans to retake his heat transfer course were put aside when Carpenter was recruited by the Navy's Direct Procurement Program (DPP) as its 500th candidate. Through an oversight, the Navy assumed that he had earned his degree. He reported for duty on October 31, 1949, at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, for pre-flight training. He graduated from pre-flight training on March 6, 1950, and then commenced primary flight training at Naval Air Station Whiting Field, learning to fly in an SNJ trainer. He then went on to Naval Air Station Corpus Christi for advanced training. Most newly-trained naval aviators—including Carpenter—aspired to fly jet fighters, but in view of his responsibilities as a husband and father (his first child was born on January 20, 1950, and Rene was pregnant with a second), he elected the less dangerous option of flying multi-engine patrol aircraft. Rene disagreed with this decision. His advanced training was in the Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer, a single-tail version of the Consolidated B-24 Liberator. Rene pinned his aviator wings on him on April 19, 1951, signifying completion of his flight training.
After three months at the Fleet Airborne Electronics Training School in San Diego, California, Carpenter went to a P2V Neptune transitional training unit at Whidbey Island, Washington, after which he was assigned to Patrol Squadron 6 (VP-6), based at Naval Air Station Barbers Point, Hawaii, in November 1951. On his first deployment, Carpenter flew on reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare missions from Naval Air Station Atsugi in Japan during the Korean War. The missions could be dangerous: on November 6, 1951, one of his squadron's aircraft was shot down over the Sea of Japan by two Soviet Lavochkin La-11 fighters, with the loss of all ten crew.