Scott Carpenter: An Astronaut from Aurora Avenue

Scott Carpenter was born in Boulder on May first, nineteen twenty-five, in a house on Aurora Avenue at the corner of Seventh Street. His father was a research chemist. His mother left when he was young, and he was raised largely by his maternal grandparents. He graduated from Boulder High School in nineteen forty-three, went to the University of Colorado, left one course short of a degree in aeronautical engineering to join the Navy, and was awarded that degree years later, after his spaceflight.

He flew reconnaissance missions along the coasts of the Soviet Union and China during the Korean War, became a test pilot in nineteen fifty-four, and was selected in April nineteen fifty-nine as one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, the group that would carry the United States into space.

On May twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-two, Carpenter launched aboard a capsule he had named Aurora Seven, completing three orbits of the Earth. The name is often said to combine the Aurora Avenue where he had grown up with the Seven of the Mercury Seven, though Carpenter himself later disputed that origin story. The mission was the fourth American spaceflight and the second American orbital flight.

The return did not go smoothly. A problem with the spacecraft's attitude system and a three-second delay in firing the retrorockets sent the capsule two hundred and fifty miles past its intended splashdown point. For some thirty five minutes, NASA did not know exactly where Carpenter was. He was floating in the Atlantic in a life raft, waiting. He was found, recovered, and arrived safely aboard the carrier U.S.S. Intrepid.

Carpenter later became an aquanaut, spending twenty-eight days on the floor of the Pacific Ocean as part of the Navy's SEALAB Two project. He died in Boulder in twenty thirteen at the age of eighty-eight. The park near Twenty-Eighth Street bearing his name is a short drive from where he was born.