Scott Carpenter's Guest Essay #13

An Engineer’s Story: From Pneumatics at KSC
to Geocaching at Scott Carpenter Park
By David Shomper

When NASA picked the Project Mercury astronauts in 1959, I was a tenth-grader already keenly interested in space and rockets. By then I had faithfully followed the progress of Vanguard, Explorer, Sputnik, Atlas, and Thor. I had even built my own two-stage rocket out of various New Year's Eve fireworks—obtained without my parents' knowledge. Unfortunately, a few milliseconds after liftoff, my rocket arced over and flew through the neighbor’s window, just prior to second-stage ignition. How I escaped jail time I do not know.

Despite that less than stellar resume, I set off for engineering school in the fall of 1961. Scott Carpenter flew Aurora 7 the following spring, when I was completing my freshman year, inspiring me to think that rockets might be a great field for me to get into. But all the engineers they showed on TV seemed so old. There was no way, I concluded, that any engineering organization would hire a kid right out of college.

Nevertheless, upon graduation, I went to work with McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, where we did the final testing on the Gemini spacecraft before shipping them down to the Cape for launch. The astronaut crews visited frequently for meetings and tests, so I got to work with a lot of them. Heady stuff for a 21-year-old. I would have paid McDonnell to let me work there.

As the Gemini 9 launch approached, in the spring of 1966, McDonnell sent me to the Cape to help. I soon realized that with Apollo coming up, this was the place to be. So when Gemini was phased out, I quit McDonnell and went to work for Boeing at the Kennedy Space Center.

By pure coincidence, my wife and I arrived in Florida the day before the maiden launch of the massive Saturn V moon rocket. Somehow, we found a room at the Titusville Howard Johnson—a room with a view of the launch pad 12 miles away. The next morning at 7 a.m., the rocket launched. We both saw it and felt it: the windows of the motel were shaking. I knew then I had made a very good career decision; Apollo was a big deal.

At the Cape, our little group of young engineers was responsible for all the pneumatic and hydraulic systems on the Saturn V launch tower at the pad; I also worked in the Firing Room for the countdowns. Although the job didn’t have the excitement of working with the astronauts, I was nevertheless part of the historic moon missions, and this satisfaction more than compensated. In college I had figured that if I could some day make $10,000 a year, I would have it made. Moving to Florida put me slightly over that lofty goal. What more could anyone want?

Watching a Saturn V launch was an amazing experience. Not being on the A team for the actual liftoff, I was fortunate to be outside with my 35mm slide and Super-8 movie cameras. At three miles away, the rocket appeared small, but when the engines lit, there was brilliant flame, lots of steam and smoke, and tremendous excitement. Shortly after ignition, you could feel the rumble in the ground and then hear the loud crackling sound of the engines. The coins in your pocket would rattle, and it felt as though an invisible force was pushing you backwards.

My days at Kennedy came to an end after Apollo 13, and it so happened that we moved to Boulder, Colorado, Scott Carpenter’s hometown and home to Scott Carpenter Park, complete with a swimming pool, a great playground, and a towering 30-foot rocket that our three-year-old loved to climb. (Now, his children visit Boulder and enjoy the rocket too.) Although I was out of the space business by then, it was nice to have a local reminder of one of the men who sparked my youthful interest in space and influenced my career path.

Ten years ago, my son gave me a GPS unit—which by today’s standards was extremely basic—and then a few years later, he introduced me to the sport of geocaching. For those unfamiliar, geocaching is an Internet-based treasure hunt using GPS. People all over the globe hide caches (>600,000 worldwide) and then post the latitude and longitude coordinates on the geocaching website (geocaching.com). Sometimes the finder has to solve a puzzle (ranging in complexity from simple to nearly impossible) to determine the final location of the hidden container and proof-of-visit signature log. Often the cache box will be large enough to contain trinkets of varying value that can be swapped out by the finder.

I recently found a way of combining my interest in space history and in geocaching by designing a geocache based on Scott Carpenter. It requires that the cacher visit Scott Carpenter Park in Boulder and solve a puzzle based on information provided on the park plaque outlining Carpenter's life. Once they solve the puzzle, they can program their GPS to guide them to the signature log hidden nearby.

I am pleased to report that the response to the Scott Carpenter geocache has been very positive. A number of finders said they knew about Scott Carpenter and had heard about Boulder’s Scott Carpenter Park, but they had never made the connection between the two. This is the beauty of geocaching. See if you can locate the Scott Carpenter geocache too.