‘BLACK-SHOE’ CARPENTER

In theory, with Slayton’s removal from Mercury-Atlas 7, the new pilot should have been his backup, Wally Schirra. However, since Scott Carpenter had only recently been primed as John Glenn’s reserve and was considered the best-prepared, his name was announced instead at the 16 March press conference. “I figured,’’ wrote Walt Williams years later, “that MA-7 was likely to be more a repeat of John’s flight than anything groundbreaking, so why not give it to Scott, since he had already trained for something pretty similar. We were thinking about a seven-orbit flight later in the year, and that would be perfect for Wally.’’ Carpenter had trained since October 1961 in Glenn’s shadow and had accrued nearly 80 hours of‘pre-flight checkout and training’ time, considerably more than Schirra or even Slayton had accumulated during their preparations for MA-7.

Yet Schirra would learn of the assignment during an impromptu gathering at the Carpenters’ home. Moreover, what should have been the most exhilarating moment of his career turned into an ordeal for Carpenter and his wife, Rene. Slayton’s anger at having lost Delta 7, coupled with Schirra’s annoyance at having been dropped in favour of Glenn’s backup, led Carpenter to spend more time apologising than training. One evening, he got home and declared to Rene: ‘‘Damn it! I’m tired of apologising. This is my flight now.’’ Although he felt no bitterness towards Carpenter, Schirra would comment in his autobiography that he ‘‘felt the system was rotten’’. As far as Schirra was concerned, although Carpenter had been through test pilot school, he was a multi-engine aviator and had been a communications officer aboard an aircraft carrier. . . not a fighter pilot. In Schirra’s mind, Carpenter represented ‘black-shoe Navy’, a seagoing fleet officer, and despite his impressive flying credentials, was not truly a ‘brown-shoe’ naval aviator.

‘‘To make it worse,’’ Schirra wrote, ‘‘I was designated Scott’s backup! I did my best and worked my tail off on Scott’s mission. I don’t think anyone knew how angry I was.’’ Even Schirra, though, had to admit that his disappointment was nothing compared to the devastating news Deke Slayton had just received. The man who would effectively replace them both had, in the December 1960 peer vote, actually

been John Glenn’s personal choice for the first American in space. Malcolm Scott Carpenter had been born in Boulder, Colorado, on 1 May 1925, the son of chemist Dr Marion Scott Carpenter and Florence ‘Toye’ Noxon. Both parents had met as undergraduates at the University of Colorado, but separated soon after their son’s birth and divorced in 1945. His mother was hospitalised with tuberculosis for several years in Carpenter’s infancy and the boy – nicknamed ‘Buddy’ – attended school in Boulder, graduating in 1943 and entering the Navy’s V-12a wartime officer flight training programme at the University of Colorado.

A year later, he moved to St Mary’s Pre-flight School in Moraga, California, undergoing six months of training, followed by another four months at Ottumwa in Iowa. On his personal website, Carpenter would write that, despite his relief when the Second World War ended, as a fledgling naval aviator, he ‘‘was deeply dejected that I had not taken part in what I assumed was the greatest aeronautical contest of the century’’. In fact, he and his classmates had logged barely a few hours in the Stearman N2S ‘Yellow Peril’ training aircraft when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; three months later, he was demobilised. He did, however, win a regimental wrestling contest whilst a member of V-12a.

At war’s end, Carpenter enrolled in the University of Colorado to read mechanical engineering, with an aeronautical option. ‘‘CU did not then offer a degree in aeronautical engineering,’’ he wrote on his website, www. scottcarpenter. com. A near-fatal car accident in September 1946 severely disrupted his studies, but he returned to university early the following year. However, he missed his final examination in thermodynamics, leaving him one requirement shy of a complete undergraduate degree. He would make up for this on his one and only spaceflight. Carpenter married Rene Price in September 1948 and would father five children – four of whom survived – from the first of his four marriages.

He then joined the Navy, receiving flight training at Pensacola, Florida, and Corpus Christi, Texas, before working in the Fleet Airborne Electronics Training School in San Diego, California, volunteering for transitional training for Lockheed’s P2V Neptune patrol bomber. His decision to fly patrol planes was, he wrote in his autobiography, a difficult one. ‘‘His boyhood dream, held all through high school and beyond was to be a fighter pilot,’’ Carpenter and Stoever wrote. ‘‘But he was now. . . a husband and a father. . . His ego demanded he be a fighter pilot, but he remembered as a boy how he had hated being fatherless.’’ The decision, he wrote, continues to haunt him. Still, in November 1951, he was assigned to Patrol Squadron Six at Barbers Point in Hawaii and, throughout the Korean conflict, engaged in anti-submarine patrols, shipping surveillance and aerial mining activities in the Yellow Sea, South China Sea and Formosa Straits.

After the war ended, Carpenter entered the Navy’s Test Pilot School at Pax River, graduating in the top third of his class, and subsequently conducted flight testing of the A-3D Skywarrior strategic bomber and the F-11F and F-9F fighters. He also tested numerous other naval aircraft – single – and multi-engine and propellor-driven fighters, attack planes, patrol bombers and seaplanes – before attending Naval General Line School at Monterey, California, in 1957 and the Naval Air Intelligence School in Washington, DC, the following year. His next assignment, in August 1958, placed him on the Hornet anti-submarine aircraft carrier, and he was serving as an air intelligence officer when he received cryptic orders from the Pentagon to report to Washington for a classified briefing. It was whilst on their way to the airport, after discussing the endless possibilities, that Rene, reading her copy of Time magazine, spotted a report about Project Mercury. “Their excitement mounted,” Carpenter wrote in his autobiography, “as they went through a list that described, well, Lieutenant M. Scott Carpenter.”

Whilst still assigned to the Hornet, he was invited to attend the second stage of testing, but met with the resistance of his skipper, Captain Marshall White, who emphatically declared that the young lieutenant was about to embark on an important training cruise. Carpenter’s entreaties fell on deaf ears, it seemed, and he was obliged to call NASA’s Dr Allen Gamble, who personally contacted the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke. The admiral, betwixt some “real sailor language’’, agreed to deal with the matter. He promptly spoke to White and, wrote Carpenter in his autobiography, the skipper “went on that training cruise without his air intelligence officer’’.

Interestingly, as the selection process for Project Mercury got underway, Carpenter and Deke Slayton were members of the same group at the punishing Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque. Slayton would later write that he had been particularly impressed to see Carpenter, during one test, blow into a tube of mercury “for about three minutes, twice as long as anybody else!’’ Carpenter’s remarkable endurance was also demonstrated after selection, when, during a centrifuge run at Johnsville, he devised a breathing technique, akin to explosive grunting, which allowed him to withstand 18 G with few ill-effects.