For Spacious Skies; The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut

Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, Inc, 2002. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xiii, [1], 370 pages. Illustrations. Signed by both co-authors on the title page. Handwritten note from Kris Stoever (the daughter of Scott Carpenter) is laid in. Publisher's promotional material also laid in. Includes Prologue; Epilogue; Notes; Acknowledgments; and an Index. Part 1 covers Earth; Part 2 covers Sky; and Part 3 covers Stars. The book also contains Epilogue, Notes, Acknowledgments, and Index. Scott Carpenter, with his daughter, Kris Stoever, clears up all lingering questions about his flight, while telling the history of an amazing frontier family and the strength of the American pioneer spirit. Malcolm Scott Carpenter (May 1, 1925 - October 10, 2013) was an American naval officer and aviator, test pilot, aeronautical engineer, astronaut, and aquanaut. He was one of the Mercury Seven astronauts. 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. Carpenter became 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 became a test pilot. 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. Derived from a Kirkus review: Mercury astronaut Carpenter and his daughter tell his life story thus far. The immediacy of the story is exemplified in the description of the few hours when Carpenter is in his Aurora 7 orbiting Earth: he then takes control of the story much as he did his capsule when the fuel ran out due to equipment malfunction. Carpenter spent his early years in the company of his grandparents. As a military test plot at Patuxent, he became a prime candidate for the Mercury Program. Description of the screening and selection process for that adventure, its endless "psychophysiological nit-picking," hews closely to Tom Wolfe's handling of it in The Right Stuff. The space flight is the centerpiece, a truly dangerous and punishing mission ("I was trained to avoid any active intellectual comprehension of disaster," he notes as his spacecraft started to fail him). His work for SeaLab after the Mercury Program gets mentioned. Carpenter comes off the pages to reveal the elemental audacity we've come to associate with the seven Mercury astronauts.