After being told that he would never fly in space again, Mercury Seven astronaut Scott Carpenter left NASA and the US Navy SEALAB program which was testing the effect of living in capsules at the bottom of the ocean for extended periods of time on humans. Carptenter (center) served abord SEALAB II.
Those selected for the SEALAB program were given the title aquanaut. Carpent is the only person in US history... and possibly world history (though I will admit that I was lazy and didn't specifically look that fact up) to become both an astronaut and an aquanaut.
Carpenter retired from the Navy on July 1, 1969, three weeks before the first NASA astronauts would land on the moon. In later life, Carpenter would work as a engeneering consultant, wasp breeder (to which I can only ask WHY? Why breed wasps when you could keep bees?!), and a novelist. When he passed away in 2013, at age 88, he was the second-to-last surviving Mercury Seven astronaut. Ironically, this left John Glenn, the oldest of the Mercury Seven at the time of their selection, as the last remianing. Glenn attended Carpenter's public memorial serive in Colorado.
I was unable to find a photograph of Carpenter's headstone - he was interred at the family's private cemetery at their ranch in Steamboat Springs, CO - so I will have to suffice with the above photo on his flag-draped coffin at his public memorial service.
I can't introduce the Next Nine without including a picture here so here is a NASA publicity photo of the Mercury Seven (seated left to right: Gordo Cooper, Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton) and the Next Nine (standing left to right: Ed White, James McDivitt, John Young, Elliot See, Charles Conrad, Frank Borman, Neil Armstrong, Thomas Stafford, and Jim Lovell). We'll get to know these guy more in coming podcasts.
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