105-650: The Atlas-Centaur was a United States expendable launch vehicle derived from the SM-65 Atlas D missile. The vehicle featured a Centaur upper stage, the first such stage to use high-performance liquid hydrogen as fuel. Launches were conducted from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) in Florida . After a strenuous flight test program, Atlas-Centaur went on to launch several crucial spaceflight missions for
210-662: A Lockheed P-2 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 . On his second deployment, forward-based at Naval Air Facility Adak , Alaska , he flew surveillance missions along
315-630: A stroke and was hospitalized in the Swedish Medical Center in Denver. He was then admitted to the Denver Hospice Inpatient Care Center. He died on October 10, 2013, at the age of 88. He was survived by his wife, four sons and two daughters, a granddaughter, and five step-grandchildren. The Governor of Colorado , John Hickenlooper , ordered flags to be flown at half mast. A public memorial service
420-512: A Director of Aquanaut Operations for SEALAB III in 1967. In the aftermath of aquanaut Berry L. Cannon 's death while attempting to repair a leak in SEALAB III, Carpenter volunteered to dive down to SEALAB and help return it to the surface, although SEALAB was ultimately salvaged in a less hazardous way. After failing to regain mobility in his arm after two surgical interventions in 1964 and 1967, Carpenter, suffering from avascular necrosis ,
525-421: A Navy FLTSATCOM satellite. Weather conditions were poor that day, with thick clouds and "moderate to heavy" precipitation. The weather conditions violated one launch criteria ("The flight path of the vehicle should not be through mid level clouds 6,000 feet or greater in depth, when the freezing level is in the clouds."), the weather team reported it as an icing issue, not a lightning risk. After discussions about
630-820: 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
735-577: A complete Centaur upper stage burn in support of the Surveyor lunar lander program. On a nominal mission, the Centaur would boost its payload on a direct ascent trajectory to the Moon . On this test flight, NASA planned to deliver the payload, a non-functional dynamic model known as SD-1, into an orbit of 167 × 926.625 km that simulated a lunar transfer trajectory. The flight quickly ended in disaster as
840-478: 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 on these subjects. 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 also appeared in television commercials for brands such as Oldsmobile , Standard Oil of California , Nintendo , and Atari . He wrote
945-724: A husband and father, he elected the less dangerous option of flying multi-engine patrol aircraft, and 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. After three months at the Fleet Airborne Electronics Training School in San Diego, California , Carpenter went to
1050-532: A launch vehicle for small uncrewed probes, and Agena was causing concerns to both the Air Force and NASA about its reliability. Eight Atlas-Centaur test missions were scheduled to be completed by the end of 1964, followed by the first Surveyor program launch. Centaur was upgraded to a high priority project because of this direct relation to Apollo. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense (DoD) had settled on
1155-662: 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 from
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#17327726172261260-581: A leave of absence to join the project. In July 1964, he went as part of the SEALAB team to Bermuda, where they held training exercises at Plantagenet Bank in 200 feet (61 m) of water. While in Bermuda, Carpenter sustained a grounding injury from a motorcycle accident , when he crashed into a coral wall. In 1965, for SEALAB II, Carpenter spent 28 days living on the ocean floor off the coast of California. He suffered another injury when his right index finger
1365-411: A matter of seconds. It was unclear what had caused the failure at first, as tracking camera footage merely showed a large white cloud enveloping the booster followed by the explosion of the entire launch vehicle. Initial assumptions were that Atlas had suffered a LOX tank failure, either from a pressurization problem, rupture of the tank from flying debris, or structural bending/aerodynamic issues caused by
1470-477: 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 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
1575-513: A network of military communications satellites known as ADVENT. A constellation of ten satellites would provide round-the-clock instant communications for the three main branches of the US military. The first three would be launched on an Atlas-Agena, then the remainder on Centaur. ADVENT never got off the drawing board, but Centaur quickly found a use for several NASA planetary probe projects, namely Mariner and Surveyor . An initial lack of funds caused
1680-598: A new first stage powered by a much more powerful Russian -designed and built RD-180 twin-chamber engine. (Atlas V is not generally referred to as "Atlas-Centaur" and does not share the AC- serial numbers of the original Atlas-Centaur that had the pressure stabilized first stages.) On 20 February 1975, AC-33 launched carrying the Intelsat IV F-6 communications satellite . The flight went entirely according to plan up until BECO at T+140 seconds. During booster separation,
1785-530: A new record at the time of 26 consecutive flights with only malfunctions of the upper stages or payload. This was the last on-pad explosion at Cape Canaveral until 2016 ( SpaceX Falcon 9 pre-flight mishap ). Post-flight investigation examined several possible reasons for the booster engine shutdown, including an accidental closure of the booster fuel staging disconnect valve, an open fuel fill/drain valve, or an accidental BECO signal. These failure modes were quickly ruled out and attention quickly centered on closure of
1890-401: A number of [required] spacecraft maneuvers and had made numerous and valuable observations in the interest of space science. ... By the time he drifted near Hawaii on the third pass, Carpenter had successfully maintained more than 40 percent of his fuel in both the automatic and the manual tanks. According to mission rules, this ought to be quite enough hydrogen peroxide, reckoned Kraft, to thrust
1995-906: A pair of technothrillers, The Steel Albatross (1991) and Deep Flight (1994), and in 2003 he published his autobiography, For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut , which was co-written with his daughter, Kristen Stoever. Carpenter was married four times, divorced three times, and had a total of eight children by three wives, seven of whom survived to adulthood. He married his first wife, Rene, in September 1948. They had five children: Marc Scott, Kristen Elaine, Candace Noxon, Robyn Jay, and Timothy Kit, who died in infancy. By 1968, Carpenter and his wife had separated, with him living in California and Rene with their children in Washington, D.C. The Carpenters divorced in 1972. In 1972, Carpenter married his second wife, Maria Roach,
2100-459: A payload of 2993 kg (that carried a mass model of the Surveyor spacecraft ). It performed propulsion and stage separation tests, following two scrubbed attempts due to bad weather. The guidance system was operated closed-loop for the first time and an attempt was made to recover the payload shroud, which was equipped with a balloon designed to release green marker dye into the ocean. The shroud
2205-744: A single word in the guidance program. The launch caused significant reappraisals of weather guidelines at Cape Canaveral. The 45th Weather Squadron uses rules developed after the incident to determine if weather conditions allow a launch. Expendable launch vehicle Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.133 via cp1102 cp1102, Varnish XID 540471818 Upstream caches: cp1102 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 05:43:37 GMT Scott Carpenter Malcolm Scott Carpenter (May 1, 1925 – October 10, 2013)
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#17327726172262310-534: A specially-enhanced version of the Atlas D vehicle for mating with Centaur stages; the Atlas was equipped with an uprated booster section, the MA-5 , which had twin turbopumps on each booster engine, and the structure reinforced for the large upper stage, along with elongated fuel tanks. Centaur development was made somewhat difficult by the insistence on modifying Atlas components rather than developing totally new ones. This
2415-495: A swivel lanyard designed to pull out an electrical plug supplying power to the booster section failed to detach, causing a voltage spike that reset the Atlas's guidance computer. The booster drifted off its flight path as a result. SECO was effected on time at T+401 seconds followed by Centaur separation and engine start, but it had become clear that the trajectory would take it into the Atlantic Ocean instead of orbit, and so
2520-539: A temporary fix was made for Atlas-Agena vehicles by equipping the valve with a manual lock that would be enabled during the pre-launch countdown. A manual E-series sustainer prevalve was also installed as a precautionary measure. An unrelated system malfunction in AC-5 was discovered when an examination of telemetry data found that a power failure had occurred in the guidance computer. As a temporary fix for Atlas-Centaur AC-6, 7, and 8, several unused components were removed from
2625-556: A warehouse in the salty air along the Florida coast and the damage was in an area not visible during a preflight examination. The Atlas used on this flight had been delivered to the Cape in 1971 and kept in storage since then, an unusually long time. In the aftermath of the accident, NASA inspected their inventory of Atlas vehicles and found several more improperly brazed pipes which needed replacement. On 26 March 1987, AC-67 failed to launch
2730-515: A washed-out bridge prevented him from getting to class. This left him one requirement short of a degree. On May 29, 1962, after his Mercury flight, the university granted him his Bachelor of Science degree because "his subsequent training as an astronaut more than made up for the deficiency in the subject of heat transfer." Carpenter met Rene Louise Price , a fellow student at the University of Colorado, where she studied history and music. She
2835-442: A year later, on 27 November 1963 at 19:03:23 GMT, AC-2 (Atlas 126D and Centaur stage #2) took place five days after President Kennedy's assassination. The redesigned Centaur stage functioned without any problems and performed a single burn to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) (orbit of 474 x 1586 km, inclination of 30.4° and period of 105.8 minutes), where it remained as of 2021. The insulation panels were permanently attached to
2940-521: The Chief of Naval Operations , Admiral Arleigh Burke was able to persuade him. The identities of the seven were announced at a press conference at Dolley Madison House in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1959: Carpenter, Gordon Cooper , John Glenn , Gus Grissom , Wally Schirra , Alan Shepard , and Deke Slayton . The magnitude of the challenge ahead of them was made clear a few weeks later, on
3045-557: The Great Depression , but eventually secured a good position at Givaudan . His 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
3150-482: The Range Safety Officer (RSO) sent the destruct command at T+413 seconds. Investigation showed that the lanyard was not only inadequately designed, but it also was an off-the-shelf component designed for marine equipment and not rockets or aircraft. The lanyard had been noted as a potential problem as early as 1967 and although fixes were made to some Atlas SLVs as well as Atlas E/F series missiles, there
3255-523: The Sputnik crisis . Among his responses, President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the Space Race . The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established on October 1, 1958, as a civilian agency to develop space technology. One of its first initiatives was Project Mercury , which aimed to launch a man into Earth orbit , evaluate his capabilities in space, and return him safely to
Atlas-Centaur - Misplaced Pages Continue
3360-511: The Surveyor program was delayed. Vehicles AC-7 and AC-10 were designated for the first Surveyor missions, with AC-8 to carry out one more test, which took place on 8 April 1966 at 01:00:02 GMT with a payload of 771 kg Surveyor mass model M-1. The Centaur's ullage motors failed again because they did not have enough propellant for the mission. It decayed on 5 May 1966. Seven Surveyor probes were launched, all on Atlas-Centaur. Beginning with AC-13 ( Surveyor 5 ), Atlas-Centaur vehicles switched to
3465-539: The Titan family for its heavy-lift launching needs and so the Atlas-Centaur would remain a civilian launch vehicle used by NASA to fly scientific and commercial payloads. A conflict between the Air Force, who had primary oversight of the Atlas, and NASA also existed as the Centaur stage required various modifications to the basic Atlas. By 1962, the Air Force had considered the Atlas fully developed and operational and
3570-483: The University of Colorado at Boulder . 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 ;
3675-546: 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 people 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 enlisted at the U.S. Navy 's recruiting office at Lowry Field near Denver . He then traveled to
3780-576: The 2009 Star Trek film. The audio phrase is used in Kenny G 's "Auld Lang Syne" (The Millennium Mix). It is also used as a part of an audio introduction for the Ian Brown song "My Star". Scott Tracy in the Thunderbirds television series was named after Carpenter. In the 1983 film, The Right Stuff , Carpenter was played by Charles Frank . Although his appearance was relatively minor,
3885-439: The Atlas's booster engines shut down after a few feet of vehicle rise and the rocket fell back onto LC-36A and exploded, the Centaur's LH2 load going off in a huge fireball for the biggest on-pad explosion yet seen at Cape Canaveral. This was also the first Atlas-Centaur equipped with the uprated 165,000 lb (75,000 kg) thrust MA-5 booster engines after the previous testing on two Atlas-Agena flights. The damage to LC-36A
3990-455: The Centaur experienced total structural breakup and loss of telemetry, the LOX tank rupturing and producing an explosion as it mixed with the hydrogen cloud. Two seconds later, flying debris ruptured the Atlas's LOX tank followed by complete destruction of the launch vehicle. The panel had been meant to jettison at 49 miles (80 km) up when the air was thinner, but the mechanism holding it in place
4095-568: The Centaur program "weak", and Wernher von Braun recommended that it be cancelled in favor of a Saturn I with an Agena upper stage for planetary missions. In addition, the production Centaur stage had less lift capacity than originally planned, leading to ARPA cancelling Project ADVENT. NASA transferred Centaur development from MSFC to the Lewis Research Center in Ohio where a team headed by Abe Silverstein worked to correct
4200-594: The Earth. The first astronauts intake was drawn from the ranks of military test pilots. The service records of 508 graduates of test pilot schools were obtained from the United States Department of Defense . From these, 110 were found that matched the minimum standards: the candidates had to be younger than 40, possess a bachelor's degree or equivalent and to be 5 feet 11 inches (1.80 m) or less. While these were not all strictly enforced,
4305-619: The Naval Air Intelligence School at NAS Anacostia in Washington D.C. In 1958 he was named Air Intelligence Officer of USS Hornet , which was in dry dock at the Bremerton Navy Yard . On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 , the first artificial satellite . This shattered Americans' confidence in their technological superiority, creating a wave of anxiety known as
Atlas-Centaur - Misplaced Pages Continue
4410-490: The Navy in 1969. Malcolm Scott Carpenter was born on May 1, 1925, in Boulder, Colorado , the son of 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
4515-543: The Range Safety Officer a few seconds later. NASA and U.S. Air Force officials, already busy investigating the launch failure of a Delta booster three weeks earlier (OTS-1), dredged the Atlas's engines from the ocean floor and sent them to Convair for examination. It was concluded that a gas generator leak caused by improper brazing of a pipe led to overheating and fire in the thrust section of the Atlas. The pipe also suffered corrosion from six years of sitting in
4620-542: The Soviet and Chinese coasts. For his third and final deployment, he was based on Guam , flying missions off the coast of China. He was designated as patrol plane commander, the only one in VP-6 with the rank of lieutenant (junior grade) —all the rest held higher rank. Impressed with his performance, the skipper of VP-6, Commander Guy Howard, recommended Carpenter's appointment to the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School . Carpenter
4725-756: The United States, including Surveyor 1 , and Pioneer 10 / 11 . The vehicle would be continuously developed and improved into the 1990s, with the last direct descendant being the highly successful Atlas II . Convair , the manufacturer of the Atlas, developed the Centaur upper stage specifically for that booster, sharing its pressure-stabilized tank structure. Centaur was the first rocket stage to utilize liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LOX) as propellants. Despite boasting high performance, LH2 had to be chilled to extremely low temperatures (lower than LOX) and its low density meant that large fuel tanks were needed. The first attempt at using an LH2/LOX-fueled engine
4830-488: The astronaut office and the flight controller office—tensions that NASA did not resolve until the later Gemini and Apollo programs—may account for much of the latter-day criticism of Carpenter's performance during his flight. "One might argue," wrote Tom Wolfe , "that Carpenter had mishandled the reentry, but to accuse him of panic made no sense in light of the telemetered data concerning his heart rate and his respiratory rate." Schirra would later experience problems with
4935-447: The automatic control system] dictated that the pilot manually control the spacecraft attitudes during this event." The PHS malfunction yawed the spacecraft 25 degrees to the right, accounting for 170 miles (270 km) of the overshoot; the delay caused by the automatic sequencer required Carpenter to fire the retrorockets manually. This effort took two pushes of the override button and accounted for another 15 to 20 miles (30 km) of
5040-435: The booster ascended. A visible thrust section fire could be seen starting at T+33 seconds and sustainer thrust vector control hydraulic pressure was lost at T+55 seconds, causing total loss of vehicle control. The payload fairing and satellite were stripped from the booster, followed by the Atlas exploding as the thrust section fire touched off the propellant tanks at T+60 seconds. The Centaur flew free until being destructed by
5145-440: The booster fuel prevalves. The low-pressure booster fuel ducting was found to have collapsed from a sudden loss of fuel flow, but had not ruptured. The investigation concluded that the fuel prevalves had only opened partially and the propellant flow was enough to push them shut, starving the booster engines of RP-1 and causing a LOX -rich shutdown. Engine start had proceeded normally and all booster systems functioned properly until
5250-458: The capsule into the retrofire attitude, hold it, and then to reenter the atmosphere using either the automatic or the manual control system. At the retrofire event, the PHS malfunctioned once more, forcing Carpenter to manually control his reentry. This caused him to overshoot the planned splashdown point by 250 mi (400 km). "The malfunction of the pitch horizon scanner circuit [a component of
5355-443: The computer in order to reduce system complexity and failure points. The failure of AC-5 resulted in another Congressional investigation, again headed by Rep. Joseph Karth , who argued that $ 600 million of taxpayer money had been spent on Centaur so far with little to show for it and that Convair was taking advantage of being the sole supplier of the Atlas-Centaur vehicle. The committee proposed that NASA consider alternate choices for
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#17327726172265460-519: The daughter of film producer Hal Roach . Together, they had two children: Matthew Scott, and Nicholas Andre , who would later become a filmmaker. He married his third wife, Barbara Curtin, in 1988. They had a son, Zachary Scott, when Carpenter was in his 60s. The marriage ended in divorce a few years later. In 1999, when he was 74, Carpenter married his fourth wife, Patricia Barrett. They resided in Vail, Colorado . In September 2013, Carpenter suffered
5565-541: The fact that he had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day since joining the Navy in 1943, and did not quit smoking until 1985. NASA's Charles J. Donlan called Carpenter's home on April 3, 1959, to inform him that he had been one of the seven men selected. Rene answered; Carpenter was on Hornet , but she could reach him. Carpenter called Donlan from a wharfside pay phone to accept the offer. Hornet 's skipper, Captain Marshall W. White, refused to release Carpenter until
5670-575: The headquarters of the 12th Naval District in San Francisco , where he was accepted into the Navy's V-5 Aviation Cadet Training Program . The Navy had recruited plenty of potential aviators at this time, so to retain young men like Carpenter, the V-12 Navy College Training Program was created, whereby cadets attended college until their service was required. When Carpenter graduated from high school, he became
5775-583: The height requirement was firm, owing to the size of the Project Mercury spacecraft. DPP was restricted to those with bachelor's degrees , so it was assumed that Carpenter had one. The number of candidates was then reduced to 32, which seemed a more than adequate number from which to select 12 astronauts. The degree of interest also indicated that far fewer would drop out during training than anticipated, which would result in training astronauts who would not be required to fly Project Mercury missions. It
5880-530: The insulation panel problems and various other design flaws. In November 1962, President Kennedy suggested cancelling Centaur entirely, but was talked out of it on the grounds that the experience gained with liquid hydrogen rocket engines was vital to the success of the Apollo program . In addition, von Braun now proposed the Saturn-Agena be ruled out for cost reasons – Saturn was too expensive to justify as
5985-404: The intermediate bulkhead separating the propellant tanks combined with numerous lesser maladies with the guidance and propulsion systems. The vehicle was launched at 2:49 PM EST (18:49 GMT ) on 8 May 1962, with the intention of performing a single burn with a partially fueled Centaur. Slightly under a minute into the launch, the Centaur stage ruptured and disintegrated, taking the Atlas with it in
6090-482: The last Atlas III (Centaur), AC-206, launched on 3 February 2005. The Rocketdyne -powered Atlas-Centaur was sometimes referred to as a 2 + 1 ⁄ 2 stage launch vehicle because the Atlas first stage (in most cases) jettisoned the twin-thrust-chamber booster engine prior to the completion of the first stage burn. Atlas-Centaur with a Rocketdyne-powered first stage was used for 167 launches between 1962 and 2004 by which time they had been superseded by Atlas V with
6195-482: The launch films quickly confirmed the Centaur as the source of trouble. The failure was determined to be caused by an insulation panel that ripped off the Centaur during ascent, resulting in a surge in tank pressure when the LH2 overheated. Beginning at T+44 seconds, the pneumatic system responded by venting propellant to reduce pressure levels, but eventually, they exceeded the LH2 tank's structural strength. At T+54 seconds,
6300-571: The news media. Knowing that the recovery vessels might take some time to get to him, and aware of the danger of Aurora 7 foundering, as had happened to Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 , Carpenter made his way out through the neck of the spacecraft, something the less agile Glenn had been unable to do. He inflated his life raft, climbed into it, and awaited rescue. The sea around him was stained with green dye. About 36 minutes after splashdown, Carpenter spotted two aircraft. A P2V Neptune from Patrol Squadron 18 flying out of Naval Air Station Jacksonville
6405-421: The night of May 18, 1959, when the seven astronauts gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch their first rocket launch, of an SM-65D Atlas , which was similar to the one that was to carry them into orbit. A few minutes after liftoff, it spectacularly exploded, lighting up the night sky. The astronauts were stunned. Shepard turned to Glenn and said: "Well, I'm glad they got that out of the way." Carpenter, along with
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#17327726172266510-520: The other six Mercury astronauts, oversaw the development of the Mercury spacecraft. Each had a specialty; Carpenter's was the onboard navigational equipment. He served as backup pilot on Mercury-Atlas 6 for Glenn, who flew the first U.S. orbital mission aboard Friendship 7 in February 1962. Carpenter, serving as capsule communicator on this flight, can be heard saying "Godspeed, John Glenn" on
6615-587: The outside of the spacecraft, which he could produce by rapping on the wall near the window. He renamed them "frostflies". Carpenter's performance in space was the subject of criticism and controversy. NASA's 1989 official history of Project Mercury says that until the third pass over Hawaii, Christopher C. Kraft Jr. (who directed the flight from Cape Canaveral) "considered this mission the most successful to date; everything had gone perfectly except for some overexpenditure of hydrogen peroxide fuel". However, then problems occurred and Kraft wrote in his 2001 memoir "He
6720-539: The override button on his Mercury-Atlas 8 flight. Carpenter met Jacques Cousteau , who was giving a public lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963. When Carpenter expressed interest in underwater research, Cousteau suggested that he might consider the U.S. Navy's SEALAB project. Carpenter sought out Captain George F. Bond from SEALAB, and obtained permission from NASA to take
6825-438: The overshoot. The thrusters had a set sequence of ignition, and that sequence was delayed by Carpenter manually firing them. This added another 60 miles (100 km), producing a 250-mile (400 km) overshoot. The flight lasted 4 hours and 56 minutes, during which Aurora 7 had attained a maximum altitude of 166 miles (267 km) and an orbital velocity of 17,532 miles per hour (28,215 km/h). During reentry , there
6930-449: The planetary probe program, such as Titan IIIC , or outsource the manufacture of Centaur to other contractors. NASA representatives argued that this was impossible as no other aerospace company had the experience or technical capability to manufacture the Centaur's balloon tanks. The pad LC-36B was hastily brought online, with a successful AC-6 (vehicle 151D) launched on 11 August 1965 at 14:31:04 GMT. Although Centaur appeared flight-ready,
7035-508: The project to take far longer than intended. Under original timetables, Centaur was to make its first flight in January 1961. In October 1961, the first Atlas-Centaur (Vehicle Flight-1: Atlas 104D and Centaur F-1) arrived at Cape Canaveral and was erected at the newly completed and specifically built LC-36A. Technical problems caused the vehicle to sit on the launch pad for seven months, the most serious being leakage of liquid hydrogen through
7140-400: The recording of Glenn's liftoff. The next mission was a second manned orbital flight to be flown by Slayton (in a capsule he would have named Delta 7) , but he was suddenly grounded for an atrial fibrillation . Carpenter was assigned to replace him instead of Slayton's backup, Schirra, as Carpenter had more training time in the simulators. In contrast to Glenn's flight, Mercury-Atlas 7
7245-502: The responsibility of the ground controllers. Gene Kranz , assistant flight director at the time, acknowledged that and placed some of the blame on the shoulders of ground control: "A crewman distracted and behind in the flight plan is a danger to the mission and himself. ... The ground had waited too long in addressing the fuel status and should have been more forceful in getting on with the checklists." Moreover, hardware malfunctions went unidentified, while organizational tensions between
7350-499: The risk posed by ice, the NASA program directors gave the go-ahead. The Atlas was struck by lightning around 48 seconds into launch. Control of the booster started to fail and it broke apart from structural loads at T+50 seconds. The Range Safety Officer sent the destruct command, but there was no evidence that the booster ever received it. Debris rained out of the clouds onto the pad area, the shoreline, or in shallow water just off of it and
7455-573: The seaplane might break up, although the crew did not consider the swell dangerous. After three hours, Carpenter was picked up by a HSS-2 Sea King helicopter, which took him to Intrepid , while Aurora 7 was recovered by John R. Pierce . Postflight analysis described the PHS malfunction as "mission critical" but noted that the pilot "adequately compensated" for "this anomaly ... in subsequent inflight procedures," confirming that backup systems—human pilots—could succeed when automatic systems fail. Some memoirs, such as that of Gene Cernan , have revived
7560-454: The simmering controversy over who or what, exactly, was to blame for the overshoot, suggesting, for example, that Carpenter was distracted by the science and engineering experiments dictated by the flight plan and by the well-reported fireflies phenomenon: Scott was the only multi-engine pilot among the elite cadre of veteran jet pilots, and it was whispered that he didn't volunteer for the space program, his dynamic and attractive wife did. Scott
7665-518: The stage as the jettison problem had still not been solved. Vibration data proved that the panels would have prematurely detached had they not been bolted down. The ultimate fix to the panel problem added more dry mass to Centaur, further dropping its payload capacity. This Atlas-Centaur 2 launch vehicle was used for performance and structural integrity tests. It carried a payload of 4621 kg and instrumented with 907 kg of sensors, equipment, and telemetry. The AC-3 flight (Atlas 135D and Centaur #3)
7770-690: The standardized SLV-3 Atlas core. Initially, a modified Atlas D designated LV-3C was used as the first stage. This was quickly replaced by SLV-3C, and later the SLV-3D, both derived from the standard Atlas SLV-3 rocket. Two spaceflights, with the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 space probes to Jupiter , Saturn and exiting the Solar System , used a spin-stabilized " Star-37E " solid propellant final stage weighing 2,473 pounds (1,122 kg) and contributing 8,000 mph (13,000 km/h; 3.6 km/s) to
7875-499: The summer of 1927, Carpenter's mother, who was ill with tuberculosis , returned to Boulder with him (mountain air was then 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. His father remained in New York, and he seldom saw him. He found it hard to find work during
7980-413: The unproven Atlas-Centaur combination, and indeed there had been several previous occurrences of these failure modes on Atlas launches. Scott Carpenter 's Mercury flight was only days away, and if the failure were caused by the Atlas, it could mean significant delays for that mission, which used a similar Atlas D derived Atlas LV-3B booster. However, analysis of telemetry data and closer examination of
8085-428: The valve closed. Booster shutdown occurred at T+1.7 seconds and the vehicle impacted on the pad at T+2.8 seconds. Bench testing confirmed that there were several possible ways that the valve would only open partially, although the exact reason was not determined. This failure mode had never occurred in the 240 Atlas launches prior to AC-5 despite always having been possible. Until a more permanent solution could be found,
8190-482: The vehicle to tumble out of control. After ten orbits, the Centaur reentered over the South Pacific , on 12 December 1964. The AC-5 flight (Atlas 156D) on 2 March 1965 at 13:25 GMT from Cape Kennedy in a highly elliptical orbit, with a payload (Surveyor SD-1) of 951 kg, was only intended to carry out a single burn of the Centaur C, and program officials felt confident. This mission was designed to rehearse
8295-703: The velocities of the spacecraft. With the retirement of the Agena stage in 1978, all Atlas flown from that point onward were paired with Centaurs except for a few military flights involving decommissioned Atlas E/F missiles. Originally designed and built by the Convair Division of General Dynamics in San Diego , California , production of Atlas-Centaur at Convair ended in 1995 but was resumed at Lockheed Martin in Colorado . The list of Atlas-Centaur ID numbers began with AC-1 launched on 8 May 1962 and ended with
8400-681: Was M. Scott Carpenter Elementary School in Old Bridge, New Jersey . The Scott Carpenter Space Analog Station was placed on the ocean floor in 1997 and 1998. It was named in honor of his SEALAB work in the 1960s. Carpenter was named to the International Air & Space Hall of Fame in 2008 and the International Space Hall of Fame in 1981. Carpenter, along with the rest of the Mercury Seven astronauts,
8505-447: Was a great deal of public concern over whether Carpenter had survived. Broadcasting from a CBS news van in Florida, Walter Cronkite painted a grim picture. Although Aurora 7 ' s Search And Rescue And Homing (SARAH) beacon broadcast its precise location, and the recovery vessels, the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid and the destroyer USS John R. Pierce , were on their way, NASA did not pass this information along to
8610-852: 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. On October 31, 1949, Carpenter was recruited by the Navy's Direct Procurement Program (DPP) as its 500th candidate. He reported to Naval Air Station Pensacola , Florida , for pre-flight training, from which he graduated on March 6, 1950. He then commenced primary flight training at Naval Air Station Whiting Field , learning to fly in an SNJ trainer. He then went 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
8715-558: Was able to compensate for a time, but the Centaur eventually lost control and began tumbling. Premature engine shutdown due to propellant starvation occurred at T+496 seconds, and the Centaur impacted in the South Atlantic . Postflight investigation traced the malfunction to a failure of the Centaur-2 engine hydraulic gimbal actuator. The AC-4 flight (Atlas 146D and Centaur #4) was launched on 11 December 1964 at 14:25:02 GMT with
8820-519: Was against any further significant changes to it which might potentially jeopardize the ICBM program. The dispute was ultimately resolved by NASA agreeing to purchase standard Atlas D vehicles which could be custom-modified for Centaur launches. However, when the Atlas ICBM program ended in 1965, Convair replaced all of the earlier variants with a standardized booster for all space launches. More than
8925-547: 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
9030-474: Was an astronaut and an aquanaut." In 1962, Boulder community leaders dedicated Scott Carpenter Park and Pool in honor of native son turned Mercury astronaut. The park features at 25-foot tall climbable metal rocket spaceship. The now-closed Aurora 7 Elementary School, also in Boulder, was named for Carpenter's spacecraft. Scott Carpenter Middle School in Westminster, Colorado , was named in his honor, as
9135-528: Was completely ignoring our request to check his instruments... I swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never again fly in space." Kraft went so far as to name the chapter of his memoirs dealing with Carpenter's flight The Man Malfunctioned . Unnoticed by ground control or pilot, however, the overexpenditure of fuel was caused by an intermittently malfunctioning pitch horizon scanner (PHS) that later malfunctioned at reentry. Still, NASA later reported that Carpenter had: exercised his manual controls with ease in
9240-465: Was designed inadequately, leading to premature separation. The insulation panels had already been suspected during Centaur development of being a potential problem area, and the possibility of an LH2 tank rupture was considered as a failure scenario. Testing was suspended while efforts were made to correct the Centaur's design flaws. A Congressional investigation in June 1962 called the overall management of
9345-475: Was done for time and budget reasons and because it allowed the Centaur to be manufactured on the existing Atlas assembly line at Convair. The engines were manufactured by Pratt & Whitney . Originally under ARPA supervision, Centaur was transferred to NASA in July 1959, eleven months after the program's inception. The Air Force retained overall supervision in part because they intended to use Centaur to launch
9450-414: Was easily recovered. A section of the payload fairing was found to have multiple small holes burned in it due to repeated lightning strikes. The key piece of evidence was Atlas's flight computer, which was recovered intact and examined. It was discovered that the last command issued was a signal to gimbal the booster engines hard to right, caused apparently by lightning induced electromagnetic pulse altering
9555-465: Was held at St. John's Episcopal Church in Boulder, which was attended by fellow astronauts John Glenn, Gene Cernan, Charles Duke , Rusty Schweickart , Jack Schmitt , David Scott , Charles Bolden , Dan Brandenstein , Bob Crippen , Bruce McCandless II , Dick Truly and Charles D. Walker . His remains were cremated and the ashes buried on the family's ranch near Steamboat Springs, Colorado . When asked in 2012 what his legacy would be, he replied: "I
9660-441: Was just glad to be around, and was physically fit to an amazing degree. 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. Yet fuel consumption and other aspects of the vehicle operation were, during Project Mercury, as much if not more
9765-440: Was launched on 30 June 1964 at 14:04:22 GMT with a payload of 4815 kg. Atlas performance was close to nominal with the sustainer running slightly LOX-rich for the first 70 seconds of flight and the trajectory being more lofted than expected. Insulation panel and payload shroud jettisons were tested for the first time. Following Centaur staging and engine start, the number two (C-2) engine began to lose roll control. The C-1 engine
9870-485: Was named to the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1990. In 2017, Carpenter was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame . Speaking from the blockhouse at the launch of Friendship 7 , Carpenter said "Godspeed, John Glenn," as Glenn's vehicle rose off the launch pad to begin the first U.S. orbital mission on February 20, 1962. This quote was included in the voiceovers of the teaser trailer for
9975-477: Was no across-the-board effort to replace them with a more suitable component. The backup Intelsat ( Intelsat IV F-1 ) was launched successfully on AC-35 in May 1975. Two years later, on 29 September 1977, another attempted launch of an Intelsat ( Intelsat IVA F-5 ) communications satellite took place on AC-43. Shortly after liftoff, abnormal temperatures were detected in the Atlas's thrust section and continued to rise as
10080-429: Was not as severe as it looked and repairs were largely completed in three months, but the completion of LC-36B was also accelerated. Most damages were thermal rather than structural, and the upper portion of the umbilical tower, which was in the center of the LH2 blast, had been subjected to temperatures of 3315 °C. The accident marked the first failure of an Atlas booster in a space launch since Midas 8 in June 1963,
10185-841: Was part of Class 13, at NAS Patuxent River , Maryland , in 1954. He flew aircraft such as the AD Skyraider and the Martin P4M Mercator . For the first time, he flew jets, including the F9F Panther , F11F Tiger and A3D Skywarrior . He remained at Patuxent River until 1957, working as a test pilot in the Electronics Test Division. Carpenter attended the Navy General Line School in Monterey, California , in 1957, and then
10290-479: Was planned as a scientific mission rather than an engineering one. After the most trouble-free countdown of Project Mercury to date, Carpenter flew into space on May 24, 1962, watched by 40 million television viewers. He performed five onboard experiments per the flight plan, and became the first American astronaut to eat solid food in space. He also identified the mysterious "fireflies" observed by Glenn during Friendship 7 as particles of frozen liquid loosened from
10395-505: Was ruled ineligible for spaceflight and further deep-sea missions. He spent the last part of his NASA career developing underwater training to help astronauts with future spacewalks . He resigned from NASA in August 1967, and retired from the Navy in 1969 with the rank of commander, after which he founded Sea Sciences, Inc., a corporation for developing programs for utilizing ocean resources and improving environmental health. Carpenter became
10500-444: Was sighted by recovery crews but sank into the ocean and could not be located. The Atlas phase of the flight and the initial phase of Centaur flight were uneventful. The mission went awry when the Centaur could not be restarted due to an ill-conceived design modification — the ullage rockets were reduced in size to save weight, however, they proved insufficient to settle the propellants in the tanks. Subsequently, venting hydrogen caused
10605-460: Was the U.S. Air Force 's top-secret Lockheed CL-400 Suntan reconnaissance aircraft program in the mid-1950s. The progress made during the aborted venture was picked up by Convair and others for rocket stage use. Originally, Centaur was conceived of as a purely experimental project to develop an experience for larger, more powerful rocket stages so as not to distract Convair's focus on the all-important SM-65 Atlas missile program. Convair developed
10710-440: Was the first to sight and mark Carpenter's position. It was followed by a Piper Apache , which circled and photographed. Carpenter then knew he had been located. They were followed by SC-54 Skymaster aircraft, one of which parachuted two frogmen, while another dropped a flotation collar that the frogmen attached to Aurora 7 . An Air Force SA-16 Albatross arrived to collect them, but NASA Mission Control forbade it for fear that
10815-529: 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. Carpenter obtained permission from NASA to take
10920-555: Was therefore decided to halve the number of astronauts. Then came a grueling series of physical and psychological tests at the Lovelace Clinic and the Wright Aerospace Medical Laboratory . Carpenter was considered the most physically fit by his peers; he had the lowest body fat, scored highest on the treadmill and cycling tests, and was able to hold his breath the longest. This was despite
11025-468: Was wounded by the toxic spines of a scorpion fish . SEALAB II coincided with Cooper's Gemini 5 mission, and he and Carpenter held the first conversation between a craft in outer space and one on the ocean floor. Carpenter returned to NASA as Executive Assistant to the Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center , then joined the Navy's Deep Submergence Systems Project based in Bethesda, Maryland , as
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