the most trouble-free countdown of Project Mercury to date, Carpenter flew into space on May 24, 1962, watched by 40 million television viewers. He performed five onboard experiments per the flight plan, and became the first American astronaut to eat solid food in space. He also identified the mysterious "fireflies" observed by Glenn during Friendship 7 as particles of frozen liquid loosened from the outside of the spacecraft, which he could produce by rapping on the wall near the window. He renamed them "frostflies". Carpenter's performance in space was the subject of criticism and controversy. NASA's 1989 official history of Project Mercury says that until the third pass over Hawaii, Christopher C. Kraft Jr. (who directed the flight from Cape Canaveral) "considered this mission the most successful to date; everything had gone perfectly except for some overexpenditure of hydrogen peroxide fuel". However, then problems occurred and Kraft wrote in his 2001 memoir "He was completely ignoring our request to check his instruments... I swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never again fly in space." Kraft went so far as to name the chapter of his memoirs dealing with Carpenter's flight The Man Malfunctioned. Unnoticed by ground control or pilot, however, the overexpenditure of fuel was caused by an intermittently malfunctioning pitch horizon scanner (PHS) that later malfunctioned at reentry. Still, NASA later reported that Carpenter had: At the retrofire event, the PHS malfunctioned once more, forcing Carpenter to manually control his reentry. This caused him to overshoot the planned splashdown point by . "The malfunction of the pitch horizon scanner circuit [a component of the automatic control system] dictated that the pilot manually control the spacecraft attitudes during this event." The PHS malfunction yawed the spacecraft 25 degrees to the right, accounting for of the overshoot; the delay caused by the automatic sequencer required Carpenter to fire the retrorockets manually. This effort took two pushes of the override button and accounted for another 15 to of the overshoot. The thrusters had a set sequence of ignition, and that sequence was delayed by Carpenter manually firing them. This added another , producing a overshoot. The flight lasted 4 hours and 56 minutes, during which Aurora 7 had attained a maximum altitude of and an orbital velocity of . During reentry, there was a great deal of public concern over whether Carpenter had survived. Broadcasting from a CBS news van in