The Last of the Original “Astronaut Wives”

Rene Carpenter was ahead of her time, and highly accomplished in her own right.

Rene & Scott Carpenter with their children at a presidential show and tell at the White House on 5 June 1962. (Photo: JFK Presidential Library)

Rene Carpenter — the wife of America’s fourth man into space, Scott Carpenter — was extremely supportive of her husband’s career, but wasn’t content with the subservient role NASA assigned her.

Born in Iowa in 1928, Rene’s mother — who had a job, which was fairly unusual in the 1920s — had divorced when Rene was 2, which was also unusual for the era. Her new husband adopted the 8-year-old Rene, which she pronounced “Reen” throughout her life, and the family moved to Boulder, Colorado.

After graduating from Boulder High School, she met Scott Carpenter, and they married in Boulder in 1948. Carpenter, about 3 years her senior, had grown up in Boulder, and was friends with a classmate at University Hill Elementary School: Anne … who later became my mother-in-law. My wife remembers the Carpenters, and that Rene was “a sweet lady.”

This toy train was made by Scott Carpenter in 1934, while he was a fourth-grader at University Hill Elementary in Boulder, Colo. He gleefully presented it to a favored classmate, Anne — who became my mother in law. It is now owned by her daughter, Kit Cassingham. The model was clearly inspired by the Burlington Zephyr, which Scott Carpenter may have seen in Denver before its record-setting run from Denver to Chicago on 26 May 1934. (Photo by the author)

Scott became a pilot in the U.S. Navy — Rene pinned his aviator wings on him upon his graduation from flight school in April 1951. He was a good pilot: his skipper recommended…