“Carpenter was self-confident, competent, unflappable …”

– Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 92.

The astronaut/aquanaut Scott Carpenter died today at the age of 88. In the 1960s Carpenter was an important member of the Navy’s SEALAB project and one of the pioneers of saturation diving.