life:

50 years after Scott Carpenter became the second American to orbit the Earth, LIFE  celebrates his career as an astronaut with a series of photos — many of which never ran in LIFE — that focus not on the cutting-edge technology or the innovative training that made the Mercury flights possible (and helped make rock stars of the Mercury 7 in the early 1960s), but instead reveal the quieter, more intimate side of a legendary astronaut’s life.

Morse’s warm, companionable pictures convey not merely, as LIFE put it in one of several articles on Carpenter and his flight in the spring on 1962, “a sensitive man’s exhilaration on a rugged ride.” 

See the photos from this issue of LIFE here.

Original caption from LIFE magazine: “A few minutes before the launch, Candy Carpenter had talked to her father on the phone as he lay in his capsule.”

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