Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter had the right stuff

Scott Carpenter, the second American to orbit the earth and one of the seven Mercury astronauts immortalised in Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff, has died. He was 88.

He died in a Denver hospice from complications from a stroke in September.

Project Mercury, the first US human space-flight programme, proved the viability of manned missions and laid the groundwork for the Apollo moon landings. Of the seven Mercury astronauts, only John Glenn, who went on to serve as a US senator from Ohio, survives.

A navy test pilot when he was tapped for America's nascent space programme, Carpenter orbited his Aurora 7 spacecraft around the earth three times on May 24, 1962, three months after Glenn became the first American to do so. Carpenter had been the backup for Glenn's historic mission, which took place almost a year after the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the earth.

Almost five hours in duration, Carpenter's flight didn't lack for drama. The temperature in the cabin reached 42 degrees Celsius, and a malfunction of the automatic-control system forced him to take manual control of the spacecraft before re-entering earth's atmosphere. He fired the craft's rockets seconds too late, and with the craft at too shallow an angle, and so missed his ocean target by 400 kilometres. An hour passed before he was plucked from the ocean and the nation could breathe a sigh of relief.

Receiving a congratulatory call from President John F. Kennedy, Carpenter told him: "My apologies for not having aimed a little bit better on re-entry."