Astronaut with ‘The Right Stuff,’ West Palm Beach resident M. Scott Carpenter dead at 88

M. Scott Carpenter’s five-hour journey broke the bonds of Earth and changed both a world and his life.

The West Palm Beach resident, who became the fourth American in space more than a half-century ago, died Thursday at the Denver Hospice, wife Patty Barrett Carpenter told The Palm Beach Post.

Carpenter, 88, who had a second home in Vail, had suffered a stroke a month ago, Patty Carpenter said from Colorado.

The Carpenters had lived part time or full time in Palm Beach County for about a decade, she said. “If he couldn’t ski, he’d like to be in Florida.”

In October 2012, Carpenter was on hand as 11 students at the South Florida Science Museum in West Palm Beach conversed with Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, who was passing overhead on the International Space Station.

“They represent the life and everlasting future of this nation in its scientific pursuits,” Carpenter said of the children.

West Palm Beach attorney and historian Harvey Oyer III, a family friend, had driven Carpenter to the event.

“Watching him with the kids at the science museum was pretty remarkable,” Oyer said Thursday. “Scott had a magical way about him. He would enthrall adults and children alike and interest them in science.”

Carpenter’s death leaves only John Glenn of the original Mercury 7 astronauts.

In an interview at his Palm Beach Gardens home in 2007, Carpenter recalled the instant fame of rocketing from Navy test pilot to one of the men later immortalized in the best-selling book and movie, “The Right Stuff.”

“We were lionized almost immediately,” Carpenter recalled. “Being the first, everything we did was novel.”

“He was one of us,” said Edgar Mitchell, 83, who set foot on the moon nine years after Carpenter’s flight.

“In those days, it was all brand new and everybody was fresh and didn’t know really what the hell they were doing,” Mitchell said from his suburban Lantana home. “He was one of the early pioneers and ought to be properly given credit for that.”

Robert Crippen, 76, who flew the first space shuttle mission in April 1981 and who lives in Palm Beach Gardens, said Thursday that Carpenter “kind of paved the way for us guys that followed him. He was a great guy, a super astronaut, and a really good friend. We’re going to miss him.”

“He was in the first vanguard of our space program — the pioneers who set the tone for our nation’s pioneering efforts beyond Earth and accomplished so much for our nation,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. “His accomplishments truly helped our nation progress in space from the earliest days to the world leadership we enjoy today. We will miss his passion, his talent and his lifelong commitment to exploration.”

On May 24, 1962, Carpenter, then 37, blazed into space aboard Aurora 7, becoming the fourth American in space and the second to reach Earth orbit.

The night before he launched, his father, chemist Marion Carpenter, wrote him a note saying, “You are privileged to share in a pioneering project on a grand scale — in fact, the grandest scale known to man.”

He circled the world three times and returned a hero. Presidents and former presidents feted him in New York and Washington. As many as 300,000 packed downtown Denver to welcome him home.

In 1965 he took a leave from NASA and joined a project to explore the deep oceans, spending 30 days on the ocean floor, 205 feet down, off the California coast.

He later would conduct underwater training of astronauts to help them prepare for space walks. And he helped design a lunar module that could land on the moon and, most importantly, get off it and get the occupants home.

Carpenter said in 2007 he was surprised space exploration had not advanced at a greater pace. The space shuttle program already had been ordered wound down. Its last mission would fly four years later.

“A lot of us figured we’d be on Mars” by now, he said. “We need to go to Mars. We need to go back to the moon. The International Space Station. I wish it had more support from the people that will benefit.”

Late in life, Carpenter continued to do motivational speaking and a lot of it to young people.

“I just tell them what they can do in space. There are many more challenges. But they should know anything they can imagine, they can do, if they work hard enough at it.”

Carpenter said he knew he would not live to see many of the next great steps in space. But he insisted they must be taken.

“It’s the most important thing for this nation to do. For humanity to do,” he said. “It’s humanity’s destiny.”

As for his own life, he said, “It’s been a marvelous ride.”

Besides his wife, Carpenter is survived by six children, three stepchildren, one granddaughter and five step-grandchildren.

Patty Bartlett Carpenter said funeral arrangements were incomplete Thursday but that they’d be held in her husband’s birthplace of Boulder, Colo.

Malcolm Scott Carpenter