science · 01 May 1925 · 100 years ago
birth
Born 1 May 1925; died 10 Oct 2013 at age 88.
Malcolm Scott Carpenter was an American astronaut whose spaceflight was the second U.S. mission to orbit the Earth. His Mercury-Atlas 7 launched on 24 May 1962 from Cape Canaveral, circled the Earth three times, and splashed down 4-hr 56-min later. Of the original seven Mercury astronauts, he became the fourth to fly in space, and the sixth worldwide. During his orbits, because much was still unknown, he conducted experiments, some as basic as testing whether solid food could be eaten in space. It was his only space flight. After a motorcyle accident (1964) injured his left arm, he never flew in space again. Instead, he became one of the first humans to live under the ocean surface for an extended period of time (1965) as one of the aquanauts in the Navy's Sealab II, an experimental habitat off the California coast. Later in life, he wrote novels.
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