Nation: SOMETHING I WOULD GIVE MY LIFE FOR

THE seven U.S. astronauts have one thing in common:

dedication to their mission. But in other ways they are as separate as the seven stars of the Big Dipper. Malcolm Scott Carpenter may well be the least skilled pilot among them. But he makes up for that with will power and a compelling personality. He is probably the most popular of the astronauts.

Says Dr. William Douglas, the astronauts' personal physician: "Carpenter's extreme simplicity sometimes gives the impression that he is bordering on immaturity. In fact, I would call him the least mature of the astronauts. I don't mean that he is callow or adolescent. He obviously couldn't be an astronaut if that were true. But his motivations are essentially simple and uncomplicated. He is interested chiefly in three things: his job, his family, and in keeping his body in top physical condition."

The Drifter. Carpenter's father, a chemist, and his mother separated soon after Scott was born. Stricken with tuberculosis, his mother went into a Colorado sanitarium, and Carpenter was raised in Boulder, Colo., by his maternal grandfather, Editor Victor Noxon of the Boulder County Miner and Farmer. (The Noxon house stood on Aurora Street, a name that Carpenter later was to borrow for his space capsule.) The old man gave the boy his first lesson in self-reliance: how to live by hunting and fishing in the mountains of Colorado.

But Noxon died when Carpenter was 14. Although his mother was out of the sanitarium by this time, she was still too tired to ride herd on the boy, and Scott cut loose. He told a LIFE reporter: "The local papers that say I was just a normal boy are trying to think of something not bad to say. I had a wonderful time, but I was a real rounder. I didn't study hard, and I had to quit high school football because I couldn't devote myself to learning the plays. I stole things from stores, and I was just drifting through, a sort of no-good."

After high school, Carpenter was learning to fly in the Navy when the end of World War II sent him restlessly back to Boulder. Twice he enrolled at the University of Colorado, and twice he flunked out. Then, after a long party one night in 1946, he went to sleep at the wheel of his souped-up 1934 Ford. The car knocked over three roadside posts, flew 100 ft. into the air and crashed upside down into a ditch.

Mum's the Word. The accident did far more to Carpenter than break his left leg and collapse a lung; it changed his life. Lying in a hospital bed for two weeks, Carpenter decided the time had come to settle down. He went back to the university, met and married a pretty, vivacious usherette named Rene Price, and planned to become a Navy pilot after graduation. Despite his new determination, Carpenter found he still could not pass a course in heat transfer that he needed for his degree. But the Navy somehow assumed that he had completed work for his degree and took him back. Seeing a career opening up, Carpenter kept mum about his academic failure.