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.
Don't forget SEALAB! (Score:3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg0pMbc7Opk [youtube.com]
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Before I did a quick Wiki lookup on the word aquanaut [wikipedia.org], I thought he was the first astronaut who knew how to swim. Apparently you need to dive deeper and longer to qualify for the distinction of being an aquanaut, just as you need to fly up a certain number
Run-on sentence summary (Score:5, Funny)
The run-on sentence in the summary makes it hard not to read it like he's been missing since 1962 and just now found.
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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.
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"What you are noticing is the low levels of education and intelligence on the part of all the Slashdot editors."
What we are noticing is the laziness of some ACs, who criticize the wording of the summary without even reading the first sentence of TFA.
Odd as it may seem, some of us read /. for the content, and can overlook a few grammatical errors.
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Um: "For its creation." Don't blame me; I'm just living up to my sig.
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What you are noticing is the low levels of education and intelligence on the part of all the Slashdot editors.
This used to be a good website, but now it is a pathetic joke.
You should take a look then how the competition regressed. Slashdot, with its flaws, slowly becomes the only readable tech news website left (all others need at least filtering). Editors don't do their job, yeah, but comments from the community fix their errors immediately.
And as "everything used to be better in the past", that's nothing new, just browse some writings of Roman authors. But then, even nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
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And as "everything used to be better in the past", that's nothing new, just browse some writings of Roman authors. But then, even nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Everything was better in the past, even the future!
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But then, even nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
That's not the way I remember it...
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Number two (Score:2)
Buzz Aldrin wasn't one of the original seven... (Score:2)
Buzz wasn't selected until 1963, as part of the 3rd group of astronauts.
The last survivor of the original 7 is John Glenn...
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(I think I'm really bored today)
Who's left besides John Glenn? (Score:2)
Glenn is still alive. Who's the other one?
Re:Who's left besides John Glenn? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who's left besides John Glenn? (Score:4, Informative)
He was 88 and one of the last two surviving astronauts of America's original space program
The summary was correct, just poorly written. He was one of the two surviving.
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Misread the article. It's just Glenn now, the last of the Original Seven human astronauts.
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Misread the article. It's just Glenn now, the last of the Original Seven American astronauts.
FTFY
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It's just Glenn now, the last of the Original Seven American astronauts.
"American" is redundant. "Astronaut" implies American. The other men in space in the sixties were "Cosmonauts."
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The other men in space in the sixties were "Cosmonauts."
Perhaps, but were they friends?
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It's just Glenn now, the last of the Original Seven American astronauts.
"American" is redundant. "Astronaut" implies American. The other men in space in the sixties were "Cosmonauts."
"Human" is also redundant. I don't recall the monkey being referred to as an astronaut either.
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At the risk of being modded off-topic, nick nick you've got there.
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nick nick you've got there.
You need to lay off the marriage-uana, young man.
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The other men in space in the sixties were "Cosmonauts."
oops...That should have read The other men AND WOMAN in space in the sixties were "Cosmonauts."
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"Astronaut" implies American.
No, it implies (and probably not exclusively) that they come from an English-speaking nation. There are Canadian astronauts and British astronauts.
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No, it implies (and probably not exclusively) that they come from an English-speaking nation. There are Canadian astronauts and British astronauts.
In the sixties (context of this thread and article) there were no English-speaking space explorers who weren't American. So "Astronaut" remains correct.
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Misread the article. It's just Glenn now, the last of the Original Seven American astronauts.
FTFY
Soviet spacemen were known as "confidants" rather than "astronauts".
A sad day (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, there is currently crap on the moon [youtube.com].
God speed (Score:5, Insightful)
God speed Sir. Thank you for your service.
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Welcome to Colorado.
Another of my heroes gone :( (Score:1)
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.
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It's hard to believe that men went to the moon because they don't go anymore. It's hard to believe that such knowledge, such infrastructure, such willingness to fund science, existed just a few decades ago and is now gone.
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Oh man, that's naive. Funding science had nothing to do with going to the moon. It had everything to do with beating those darn commie Russkies. I can guarantee you, without the Cold War, we'd still be wondering when some one would ever go to the moon.
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Funding science had nothing to do with going to the moon. It had everything to do with beating those darn commie Russkies.
Sure there was some of that, but there was also very much a 'we can do anything attitude' back then that seems to be mostly gone, other than in niches like iPad development. China is surging ahead of the USA and there isn't any national drive to beat them at anything...
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Sure there was some of that [...]
No, it was entirely that [theatlantic.com]. What can we do in space to beat the Russians?
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Sure we could, but if you use that attitude about everything, nothing would ever get done unless it passed some bureaucrat's idea of "practical and prudent."
Besides, that's just a fucking boring attitude.
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Then, after the Singularity, we can send our machine descendents to explore the cosmos instead of human beings that require a whole biosphere to be sent with them.
Assuming we're still around to act in any sort of capacity.
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It's hard to believe they could have faked it. Other countries were monitoring the radio communications from the CM and LMs, and would have said something if they didn't appear to be coming from the moon. The USSR in particular had no reason to cover up for the Americans.
Say they sent unmanned missions instead then. We know they got to the surface because the intact remains can be seen on photos taken by other countries who, again, have no reason to lie. Even so, deploying certain experiments like the retro
He flew into space in a beetle-sized capsule (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, this guy flew into space in something the size of a VW Beetle.
Think about that.
No guts.
No glory.
He had both.
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And with less computational power than the digital display on an FM radio in a Beetle.
Think about that.
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What's impressive is that he did it while that capsule was strapped to the top of a not-especially-reliable missile.
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What's impressive is that he did it while that capsule was strapped to the top of a not-especially-reliable missile.
Ok, why is that more remarkable than flying into space? It just means a greater tolerance for risk. Base jumpers and people who climb Mount Everest have that too.
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Is it really the size of a VW beetle? At Kennedy Space Center they have a mockup, which I think is accurately sized. Including a seat, in which you can sit. I didn't fit, because, I was too tall -- at 1.80m! That thing was tiny. Really tiny!
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Exactly - the capsule is the size of a VW Beetle - but has less legroom than the old one.
I was born in the year he went to space. (Score:2)
When I pay taxes (Score:2)
Spam (Score:1)