Mercury Aurora 7 spacecraft on display at the Museum Of Science & Industry in Chicago, Illinois. This was the second US orbital flight. The mission was to fly a repeat of John Glenn's flight in Friendship 7, and to continue to prove the systems in the spacecraft. After a nearly flawless flight, Astronaut Scott Carpenter found that part of the automatic control system failed as he was reentering the Earth's atmosphere. Carpenter had to take control and fly the reentry manually. While the spacecraft overshot its intended landing zone by 250 miles, Carpenter would have certainly perished if he had not taken over for the failed electronics, and NASA again narrowly averted disaster in the Mercury program.