Astronaut Scott Carpenter, fourth American in space, dies at 88.

Astronaut Scott Carpenter, who in 1962 became the fourth American in space and the second to orbit the Earth, died on Thursday in Colorado at age 88 of complications from a stroke, his wife Patty Carpenter said.
Carpenter, who lost radio contact with NASA controllers during his pioneering space flight and was found in the ocean 250 miles from the targeted splashdown site, went on to explore the ocean floor in later years. His wife said he died in a Denver hospice.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration chose Carpenter and six other pilots to be astronauts in 1959 for the Mercury space program as the United States entered its space race with the Soviet Union. The only surviving member of that Mercury 7 team is John Glenn, 92, now a retired U.S. Senator from Ohio. In 1962, Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and Carpenter was his backup on that mission.
Later that year, Carpenter made his only spaceflight, taking the Aurora 7 spacecraft on three laps around Earth on May 24, a few weeks after his 37th birthday. The flight of less than five hours made him the second American to orbit Earth, and the experience stayed with him until the end of his life.
"I still remember what a thrill it was being up there - I liked the feeling of weightlessness, and the view I had of Earth," Carpenter told the University of Colorado's alumni magazine last year.
The other Mercury astronauts had piloted fighter jets during the Korean War, but Carpenter mostly flew surveillance in multi-engine propeller planes.
"Scott was the only one with a touch of the poet about him in the sense that the idea of going into space stirred his imagination," Tom Wolfe wrote in "The Right Stuff," his best-selling book about the first astronauts.
A former gymnast known among colleagues for his fitness, Carpenter trained as Glenn's backup for NASA's first orbital flight. When Glenn blasted off on the Friendship 7 mission on February 20, 1962, Carpenter sent him off with a simple yet poignant radio transmission: "Godspeed, John Glenn."
Despite his fame as an astronaut, Carpenter spent considerably more time on the ocean floor than he did in outer space. In 1965, the astronaut became an aquanaut as part of the Navy's SEALAB II project, spending 30 days living and working at a depth of 204 feet off the California coast.
Born in Boulder, Colorado, he split his time between Vail, Colorado, and West Palm Beach, Florida, Patty Carpenter said. His given name was Malcolm Scott Carpenter but he used Scott as a first name.