CAPE CANAVERAL -- Scott Carpenter rode three times in orbit around the earth today but overshot his planned Atlantic landing area and gave recovery forces an anxious 40 minutes before they found him.
Space officials lost radio contact with the 37-year-old astronaut shortly after 12:30 p.m. EST and said it appeared he had overshot by 200 miles the scheduled landing area 800 miles south of here.
But a Navy search aircraft subsequently picked up the spacecrafts radio landing beacon and followed it to find Carpenter perched in a life raft.
The plane's discovery was reported to reporters here at 1:22 p.m. The spacecraft, Aurora-7, was riding the waves near the raft.
At 1:32 p.m., the Navy plane reported after a close look that Carpenter was apparently sitting comfortably in his raft.
Carpenter had embarked on his space fact-finding mission atop an Atlas rocket at 7:45 a.m. after the smoothest countdown in the history of the Mercury man-in-orbit program.
The overshot brought his flight to a suspenseful conclusion which had officials and reporters biting their nails.
An Air Force search plane arrived over Carpenters raft at 1:30 p.m., almost an hour after the capsule landed.
Two paramedics, men with parachutes, leaped into the sea to attach a large flotatation bag to Aurora-7 to keep it afloat and to give Carpenter any help he needed while waiting for surface craft to recover him.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration estimated that Carpenters spacecraft touched down about 12:41 p.m. about 1,000 miles southeast of here.
At about 12:18 p. m. EST, braking rockets to bring his craft down from orbit were fired as he approached the southwest coast of the United States.
He had reported everything aboard the craft in good condition for the fiery descent through the atmosphere to splashdown in the Atlantic.
Radio Contact Lost
As expected, radio contact was lost during the descent because of ionization of the atmosphere by the 3,000-degree heat generated by air friction.
Officials concluded when contact was not quickly regained that Carpenters craft had come in an angle which meant he had overshot the mark. They estimated the overshot at about 200 miles.
Planes with paramedics aboard were dispatched to search for the craft, presumably bobbing in the Atlantic.
Officials said it would take them about an hour to reach the calculated landing spot.
Sequence Shown
After firing of the braking rockets, radioed information from the craft showed this sequence:
12:24 p.m. EST, control system still working.
12:26 p.m., spacecraft soaring over the Gulf of Mexico and in contact with Cape Canaveral.
About 12:30 p.m.. Carpenter told as he sped over Florida that sea landing conditions were ideal.
By this time the spacecraft was plunging into dense layers of the atmosphere and braking sharply. Pre-estimates were that deceleration forces would multiply Carpenter's 155 pounds by about 7 1/2 times as the craft slowed from more than 17,500 miles an hour to about 270 miles an hour in five minutes.
Temperatures Build Up
At the same time, the temperature built up in the air around the craft's blunt nose, blacking out radio.
