Scott Carpenter, Mercury 7 astronaut and second American to orbit Earth, dies at 88 Of the Mercury 7 crew, glorified by Life magazine and then immortalized anew in Tom Wolfe's book "The Right Stuff," only John Glenn, the retired senator from Ohio, survives. Mr. Carpenter's life had an unusual vertical dimension that extended from outer space to the depths of the ocean. His five-hour, three-orbit journey in space on May 24, 1962, was marred by a wildly off-course landing and a brief spasm of national anxiety in which Americans from President John F. Kennedy on down feared that he might have perished. He later battled suggestions that he'd been joyriding and had been complicit in overshooting his target. Mr. Carpenter never flew in space again and instead went the other direction, becoming an aquanaut and devoting much of his energy to long-duration missions in undersea habitats. Like his fellow astronauts in Project Mercury - Glenn, L. Gordon Cooper Jr., Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Walter M. Schirra Jr., Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Donald K. "Deke" Slayton - Mr. Carpenter became a national celebrity when he joined the NASA space-flight program in 1959. It was Mr. Carpenter who uttered the famous line, "Godspeed, John Glenn," when Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth on Feb. 20, 1962. Mr. Carpenter became the second - and the fourth American in space - when he jumped ahead in the Mercury manifest after Slayton was forced to step aside because of a minor heart problem. The mission didn't attract the attention given to Glenn's flight, and most Americans assumed that it would go as planned. Mr. Carpenter blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in a capsule named Aurora 7 perched on top of a Mercury-Atlas rocket. He raced to an altitude of 165 miles and circled the planet at 17,500 miles per hour. "He was enjoying himself," Tom Wolfe wrote. He talked more, ate more, drank more water, and did more with the capsule than any of them ever had. He obviously loved all the experiments. He was swinging the capsule this way and that way, taking photographs a mile a minute, making detailed observations of the sunrises and horizon, releasing balloons, tending his bottles, taking readings with his densitometer, having a grand time. Mr. Carpenter also discovered the origin of the mysterious "fireflies" seen by Glenn during his earlier flight: When he inadvertently banged the hatch of the capsule he saw snowflakes fly by the window, and realized they came from the capsule and weren't part of the space environment. But things got dicey on the way home. Attitude-control equipment malfunctioned. The Aurora 7 ran low on fuel. "Because of the loss of automatic control fuel, Carpenter was ordered rather sharply by Flight Director Christopher C. Kraft to fly his vehicle manually to conserve his automatic fuel, or face being told to end his journey after two orbits," reported the next morning's Washington Post.