Overview

Book & DVD. The story of the flight of Aurora 7 has rarely been told. America's fourth manned spaceflight has often been overlooked, sometimes overshadowed by the popularity of the flight of John Glenn which took place just three months earlier. But what is often lost in the telling is the fact that Glenn had almost lost his life when his re-entry had been fraught with problems. Regardless of this danger, Malcolm Scott Carpenter stepped up to his Mercury spacecraft and into the history books. Carpenter was one of America's original seven astronauts and he would only fly into space this one time. His mission was to last less than five hours in space and his assignment was to continue to put the Mercury spacecraft through its paces. With only a single orbital test flight behind them, the engineers at NASA knew that Carpenter would still be taking a monumental risk. On 24 May 1962, Aurora 7, carrying Scott Carpenter leapt off the launch pad aboard the Atlas missile and soared into Earth orbit. After over four and a half hours in orbit Carpenter had fulfilled a busy schedule of assigned tasks, but that schedule had distracted him from the imminent task of re-entry. His small capsule would overshoot the landing site by more than 400 kilometers and would spur the world news agencies to declare him lost. Fortunately, things were not quite so bleak and Carpenter would soon be recovered by the US Navy task force and would return to tell his story. This is the story of America's second manned orbital spaceflight told by the man who flew it from his original reports. On the DVD: Aurora 7 mpg Film, Air-Ground Voice Communication Transcript (35 pages); Description And Performance Analysis (206 pages); Mercury Manned Orbital Capsule Detail Specification (166 pages); Project Mercury: A Chronology (258 pages); Project Mercury Familiarization Manual (431 pages).

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9781926592213

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Steve Whitfield is a veteran of the computer electronics and aerospace industries, and currently works as a technical and science editor.

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