Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter Dies At 88 81
schwit1 writes "M. Scott Carpenter, whose flight into space in 1962 as the second American to orbit the Earth was marred by technical glitches and ended with the nation waiting anxiously to see if he had survived a landing far from the target site, died on Thursday in Denver. He was 88 and one of the last two surviving astronauts of America's original space program, Project Mercury." NASA has a nice biography of Carpenter, too, and scottcarpenter.com has much more besides.
Re:Run-on sentence summary (Score:3, Interesting)
What you are noticing is the low levels of education and intelligence on the part of all the Slashdot editors.
That run-on summary was plagiarized directly from the New York Times article. Blame Richard Goldstein for it's creation. Slashdot only falsely attributes it to "An anonymous reader". Which is very unprofessional, but at least they didn't create or edit it.
When We Left Earth (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have Netflix streaming (or want to go through some hassle), check out When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions [netflix.com]. Absolutely fantastic documentary on the space race and the way I recently learned about his landing. For reasons outside my control, I was not alive until many years later.
I totally get the conspiracy theories about a fake moon landing. I know we did it. But looking up at the moon, it's hard to believe it.