25 May 1962 - Destroyer U.S.S. Pierce transported the Aurora 7 capsule to a pier at Naval Station Roosevelt Roads Puerto Rico. It had been picked up the previous day from where it landed in the Atlantic Ocean about 135 miles northeast of San Juan. From the pier it was moved to the airfield to be loaded aboard an Air Force transport aircraft.
Note: The aircraft in the background with white tops were the Navy P2V-7 "Neptune" aircraft from VP-18 involved in the recovery operation. LT Jimmy Hickman was the Aircraft Commander of the closer aircraft. LT Gerald McDonald commanded the other plane, and also took this photograph.
LCDR Scott Carpenter's Aurora 7 Project Mercury capsule is positioned in front of the nose-ramp leading into the transport aircraft. Later it was flown from Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico directly to Cape Canaveral. At the Cape it underwent an extensive inspection, partly to determine the problem that caused the overshot of the planned splashdown point by 240 miles. Millions of persons around the world waited for over a half hour to learn that VP-18 co-pilot LT Robert Goldner had spotted LCDR Carpenter safely in his raft.
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LT Robert Goldner
1962
This page was last updated on: January 18, 2009
Commander Lyons and Crew 1
(submitted by Plane Captain Robert Nansteel in dress blues! Can anyone identify the others in the picture?)
MERCURY AURORA 7 RECOVERY
CUBAN BLOCKADE
Space Capsule is on permanent display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
The above picture was submitted by Ron Kravitz in May, 2003. We thank him for digging through his files and sharing it with us.
If any of you have a copy of other pictures, please consider sharing them with this web site.
Robert Nanstell
Commander Lyons
This email represents the thoughts of many of our families as we get "a little older".
:
"Commander Ward:
My name is Tom Hoffer, son of Lou Hoffer who with flew with PATRON 18 from about 1961 through 1963. He was then a NAO LTJG./LT with Crew 8 among other crews. I believe he also served as the squadron's intelligence officer. During the Cuban Quarantine he was detached to Roosevelt Roads as a watchstander for whatever ad hoc intelligence center was formed.
I'm attaching some photos of a model my siblings and I gave Dad this Christmas. It's a model of Neptune Bureau #140986, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Growing up Dad always the photo of the Soviet freighter Okhotsk on his desk or wall.
A co-worker, who is by chance a retired Navy H-3 pilot and who makes models as a hobby, helped me put together this replica of #140986. We were forced to use a less than desirable plastic model kit and were mostly going off of black and white photos. We left off the Battle "E" by accident (sorry about that), the crew names beneath the cockpit window, and I missed the "LG6" above the "XVIII" on the wingtips, as well as the "8" on the underneath of the aft section of the fuselage. And while it probably won't win any awards, a lot of care went into making it. It took some doing re-creating most of the decals.
But Dad still loved it as I hope you gentlemen do as well! "
