Welcome to the launch of my official website, which we’re constructing as I type—and please excuse the dust and hammering and occasional mishap.

Launch. I like that word. Our mission? To provide fresh, first-hand information about me, Scott Carpenter, Project Mercury astronaut and Sealab aquanaut.

Over in the galleries, you’ll find a host of family, Navy, and NASA photographs, some of them, at least the family photos, going back to the nineteenth century. We are also featuring Carpenter photographs from notable collections by independent collectors Ed Hengeveld and Carmelo Pugliatti.

Look for the Rene Carpenter gallery, which will feature some rare photographs of the Mercury astronauts training with the U.S. Navy UDT divers in 1959; of desert survival training; and of jungle survival training with Group 2 astronauts.

We provide a pretty good section on Project Mercury,with write-ups of each of the six Mercury flights. There’s a brief rundown on my unusual career in the Navy, too. And a place where we will post your photographs with me.

So bear with us as I—we—cobble this site together over the next few months, and please feel free to email us greetings, corrections, suggestions for the site, and questions you’d like me to answer.

I look forward to our conversations. —Scott