Ken Havekotte
Member Posts: 3439
From: Merritt Island, Florida, Brevard
Registered: Mar 2001
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posted 05-24-2022 06:17 PM
   
It's time for another space cover celebration, this time, of Malcolm Scott Carpenter's Mercury-Atlas 7 spaceflight from the old Atlantic Missile Range (Cape Canaveral) on May 24, 1962, sixty years ago to this day.Below is a Carpenter/MA-7/Aurora 7 display panel presentation of mostly signed vintage MA-7 covers along with a few signed vintage photos, badges, cards, and other flight-related material. It's a quick assembly of some highlight items from my own collection, some of which had been signed by the original Mercury one-time spaceflight astronaut during a couple of private visits.  The signed space covers by Scott Carpenter represent one of the popular SpaceCraft Covers by Carl Swanson (perhaps my favorite cachet cover designs of the manned Mercury flights), the first-issued Orbit Covers by Bill Ronson, a John Zaso printed cover with a not-so-common Cape Canaveral machine cancel, a Bob Ekas rubber stamp cachet as Carpenter being the second American to orbit the earth, and three different recovery force ship-type covers from the USS Intrepid, USS Enterprise, and the USS Franklin Roosevelt. Scott Carpenter (1925-2013) was a dynamic pioneer of modern exploration, had the unique distinction of being the first human ever to penetrate both inner and outer space, thereby, acquiring the dual title, Astronaut/Aquanaut. On a personal note, without question, the former Navy commander and U.S. Navy Sealab aquanaut was one of the friendliness and laid-back astronauts that I have met and had the pleasure of working with on a few "space" occasions. As millions of Americans sat down to drink their morning coffee during breakfast and watched on their small black-and-white television sets, at 7:45 am on May 24, 1962, the 37-year-old rookie astronaut blasted off in his Aurora 7 spacecraft from Launch Complex 14 on Mercury Atlas 107-D. As he passed over the Florida Space Coast after a single orbit, the pilot-astronaut deployed a multicolored balloon to study the effects of space on reflective properties and conducted a few other scientific experiments. As the fourth American in space, he had become the first astronaut to eat food in space during his nearly five hour space voyage. His Aurora 7 capsule had reached a maximum altitude of 164 miles with a speed of 17,532 mph around the earth. During his three-orbit space trip, Carpenter used more fuel than planned and drifted for most of his third and final earth orbit. In preparing for his reentry and landing, he overshot his landing site in the Atlantic Ocean by 250 miles down-range and an anxious America held its breath for nearly 45 long minutes. Finally, at 2:22 pm, a Navy P2V patrol plane spotted Carpenter bobbing in his liferaft 1,000 miles southeast of the Cape. He had been found and was safe. |
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