"I've Been Thoroughly Checked Out"

BLONDE, bronzed, deep-dimpled, green-eyed and shapely. Rene Carpenter, 34, is by anyone's standard a dish. She is also self-possessed and wise. Wearing a navy blue skirt and white middy blouse, and carrying a red scarf in her hand, she stepped before newsmen at Cape Canaveral after her husband's space voyage was over. Said she: "I was dry-eyed the whole day.

I'm not a brooding person by nature." Discipline. Rene (she rhymes, it with keen) met Scott Carpenter in Boulder in 1947, when he was a university student. She was a movie house usherette and sang in a local Methodist church. A little more than a year later, they were married. As a new Navy wife in the 1950s, Rene got the basic training that pilots' wives have to expect--the hard discipline of waiting at home for word of safe landings.

"If he was flying on a project and did not come home by 6 o'clock," she has said, "I just knew I was a widow. I remember wondering once how I was going to greet the chaplain when he came to the door." In the years since, Rene has absorbed her husband's quiet fatalism.

When their second child, Timmy, died at six months in 1951, the tragedy brought the devoted couple even closer together. But when Carpenter was first called to compete for assignment as an astronaut, Rene gave him all her encouragement. At one point, after Carpenter was assigned to sea duty, she got word that he would have to tell Washington immediately if he wanted to continue in the space-training program. Without hesitation, Rene accepted on his behalf.

No Prayers. Rene wanted to share her husband's flight in the only way she knew how. Though the wives of Astronauts Shepard and Glenn had stayed away during their husbands' flights, she decided to go to Cape Canaveral last week ("The Navy brought me down, and friends gave us a house stocked with food"). She spoke to Carpenter on the phone just before liftoff, then took her children to the beach to watch the shoot. She said no prayers. "I feel the same way as Scott," she explained, referring to Carpenter's conviction that it is presumptuous to pray for oneself. After blastoff, she turned to watch the rest on television. She later admitted that she felt concerned only when first reports showed that radar contact had been lost with the space capsule after reentry. Beyond that, she had no worries: "I've been thoroughly checked out, and I've watched the egress [escape from the capsule] many times."

But Rene admitted: "The effort involved in one of these missions is such that at the end we often feel emotionally drained. We tend to fall back on comfortable phrases and words like 'happy,' 'proud' and 'thrilled,' and we feel so much more. I want to say especially that not once in the past three years would I have had Scott do less than he did today. For us, the family who also served, the rewards were very great."

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