Malcolm Scott Carpenter (May 1, 1925 – October 10, 2013) was an American naval officer and aviator, test pilot, aeronautical engineer, astronaut and aquanaut.

He appeared in television commercials and wrote a pair of technothrillers and an autobiography, For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut, co-written with his daughter, Kristen Stoever.

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.

[7] 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.

[13] After visiting his father and stepmother in New York, Carpenter returned to Boulder in November 1945 to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Colorado.

[16] On May 29, 1962, after his Mercury flight, the university granted him his Bachelor of Science degree,[17] on the grounds that "his subsequent training as an astronaut more than made up for the deficiency in the subject of heat transfer.

"[18] Carpenter met Rene Louise Price, a fellow student at the University of Colorado, where she studied history and music at the campus bookstore, where she worked part time.

[19] Plans to retake his heat transfer course were put aside when Carpenter was recruited by the Navy's Direct Procurement Program (DPP) as its 500th candidate.

On his first deployment, Carpenter flew on reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare missions from Naval Air Station Atsugi in Japan during the Korean War.

[22] The missions could be dangerous: on November 6, 1951, one of his squadron's aircraft was shot down over the Sea of Japan by two Soviet Lavochkin La-11 fighters, with the loss of all ten crewmen on board.

Hornet's skipper, Captain Marshall W. White, refused to release Carpenter until the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke called him.

[40] The identities of the seven were announced at a press conference at Dolley Madison House in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1959:[41] Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton.

[42] The magnitude of the challenge ahead of them was made clear a few weeks later, on 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.

He also identified the mysterious "fireflies" observed by Glenn during Friendship 7 as particles of frozen liquid loosened from the outside of the spacecraft, which he could produce by rapping on the wall near the window.

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".

[55] Unnoticed by ground control or pilot, however, the overexpenditure of fuel was caused by an intermittently malfunctioning pitch horizon scanner (PHS).

Still, NASA later reported that Carpenter had: exercised his manual controls with ease in a number of [required] spacecraft maneuvers and had made numerous and valuable observations in the interest of space science.

According to mission rules, this ought to be quite enough hydrogen peroxide, reckoned Kraft, to thrust the capsule into the retrofire attitude, hold it, and then to reenter the atmosphere using either the automatic or the manual control system.

[56] The PHS malfunction yawed the spacecraft 25 degrees to the right, accounting for 170 miles (270 km) of overshoot; the delay caused by the automatic sequencer required Carpenter to fire the retrorockets manually.

[58] 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.

An Air Force SA-16 Albatross arrived to collect them, but NASA Mission Control forbade it for fear that the seaplane might break up, although the crew did not consider the swell dangerous.

[59] Postflight analysis described the PHS malfunction as "mission critical" but noted that the pilot "adequately compensated" for "this anomaly ... in subsequent inflight procedures,"[61] confirming that backup systems—human pilots—could succeed when automatic systems fail.

[53] Some memoirs, such as that of Gene Cernan, have revived 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.

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.

Carpenter sought out Captain George F. Bond from SEALAB, and obtained permission from NASA to take a leave of absence to join the project.

He resigned from NASA on 3 August 1967, and joined the Navy's Deep Submergence Systems Project based in Bethesda, Maryland, as a Director of Aquanaut Operations for SEALAB III.

He 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.

He wrote 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.

[85] They had five children: Marc Scott, Kristen Elaine, Candace Noxon, Robyn Jay,[86] and Timothy Kit, who died in infancy.

"[94]In 1962, Boulder community leaders dedicated Scott Carpenter Park and Pool in honor of native son turned Mercury astronaut.