For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut (Hardcover)

Carpenter, after all, had come in for a withering printed attack in 2001, when former NASA flight director Chris Kraft published his autobiography, "Flight." In the four decades that have passed since his space flight, Carpenter had endured many remarks about his piloting skills on his space flight with his characteristic good grace. With the publishing of Kraft's book, however, it was beginning to look like Kraft's views would become the accepted version of events for historians to use. A response was needed to give the other side of the story - and, thankfully, Scott Carpenter has written it. The resulting book is co-authored with Carpenter's daughter, Kris Stoever, who was six years old when her father became the second American to orbit the Earth. The book offers a level-headed, clear response to the accusations that Kraft and others made, offering unique insights into the flight of Aurora 7 from the man who was there.

This book is far more than a response to others. Carpenter and Stoever open by weaving a warm family history of growing up in Boulder, Colorado in the 1920s, using extracts from family letters to give unexpectedly vivid insights into an era that was already passing away with Carpenter's grandfather's generation. The book, however, is no cozy, romantic trip to a bygone idyll; the letters they wrote to each other portray a splintering, disintegrating marriage in which young Scott could not rely on either of his parents for his needs. Unlike many books about American heroes, this book is honest about events such as Carpenter's teenage years, when he would upset his neighbors with his cursing and acquired a BB gun which he used to shoot out city street lights.

The family history would make a great and readable book in itself but, of course, Carpenter and Stoever also cover in fascinating detail Carpenter's test piloting years, his selection as an astronaut, and the background behind the exploration of this new frontier. He gives a thorough technical account of the flight, explaining what went right, what went wrong and why, removing the petty sniping of other authors and showing how he managed to work as a test pilot and a scientist at the same moment, and still get home alive. The reader also sees that Carpenter had more of a deep fascination in space itself than any other astronaut of that era - he truly experienced space, and it is fascinating to read just how. I highly recommend this book.

My only disappointment is that, whereas most astronauts' careers followed pretty similar paths, Scott's did not; instead of heading for Outer Space after his first and only mission, he opted for Inner Space and the Navy's Man in the Sea Sealab Project. I know very little about this and would have been keen to learn much more; sadly, the book only accords a few pages to the undertaking.

Altogether, though, the book is a touching and scholarly appraisal of one of the lesser-known astronauts.