THE PASSING OF AN EARLY PATHFINDER
(…which led to our reaching for those unreachable stars)

Scot Carpenter passed away last week,  with little fanfare or notice, mostly because few people today were around to witness his venture as our second astronaut reaching out from this Earth of ours into the nearby frontier of Space.

The Soviet Russians had made the earliest moves towards it, launching –Sputnik- as the first human-made satellite, followed soon by sending the first live creature, a German Shepherd – to orbit our globe, and ultimately Yuri Gregorian, the first human astronaut.

But we Americans came hard on their heels behind them with our –Mercury Program- a program by which we aimed to test and develop the means to keep a human not only alive for an extended period in space…but brought safely back down to earth as well. We did it, first with John Glenn and then Scott Carpenter. It was not an easy thing and, in Scott Carpenter’s case, the whole thing nearly went terribly wrong. He could have become…the man who never returned.

Sealing a guy into a capsule not much bigger than a phone booth, then perching it on top of a very explosive rocket, and launching him out there into nearby space wasn’t much of a problem.  Keeping him alive for a period of time as he orbited around the globe, and figuring how best to bring him back home again…was another matter. Fuel problems, navigation and communication problems plagued Carpenter’s mission, but by his courage, skill, and determination, he over rode all that, manually flying his “phone booth” to return home and managing to splash down in the Pacific, even though he was hundreds of miles from the area planned for it.  Which meant it took a few extra days after splashdown before they found him, bobbing around all that time, alone, in that watery space.

He was not a happy camper, and wasn’t shy about expressing his feeling about it, which didn’t sit too well with his NASA bosses at the time. So he never flew in one of those space machines again.

No matter, he was an early pathfinder…which led to our reaching for those unreachable stars, and that’s something they’ll never be able to take away from him. The lessons learned from his experience are what ultimately allowed us to achieve things like the –Space Shuttle- the –Space Station- Voyager,  our – Mars Rovers – and of course, the – Hubble Telescope-.

So we’ll just echo John Glenn’s tribute to him here by saying…Godspeed, Scott Carpenter… and may you reach those unreachable stars.

CENTURION