Astronaut Scott Carpenter sat in his Aurora 7 spacecraft on May 24, 1962, just before he became the second American to orbit the Earth. The nail-biting layer to his historic flight is that it nearly ended in a fatal tragedy due to a mix of human error and mechanical glitches. During the mission, Carpenter became fascinated by a phenomenon he called fireflies, which were actually floating ice particles outside his window, and he accidentally consumed precious fuel while maneuvering the capsule to look at them. A malfunctioning pitch horizon scanner contributed to guidance problems during re-entry, and combined with his earlier fuel use, caused his retrorockets to fire in a way that left him overshooting his splashdown target by about two hundred and fifty miles and floating alone in the Atlantic Ocean for hours while the world feared he had not survived the heat of re-entry.