himself. ... The ground had waited too long in addressing the fuel status and should have been more forceful in getting on with the checklists." Moreover, hardware malfunctions went unidentified, while organizational tensions between the astronaut office and the flight controller office—tensions that NASA did not resolve until the later Gemini and Apollo programs—may account for much of the latter-day criticism of Carpenter's performance during his flight. "One might argue," wrote Tom Wolfe, "that Carpenter had mishandled the reentry, but to accuse him of panic made no sense in light of the telemetered data concerning his heart rate and his respiratory rate." Schirra would later experience problems with the override button on his flight. Ocean research Carpenter met Jacques Cousteau, who was giving a public lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963. When Carpenter expressed interest in underwater research, Cousteau suggested that he might consider the U.S. Navy's SEALAB project. Carpenter sought out Captain George F. Bond from SEALAB, and obtained permission from NASA to take a leave of absence to join the project. In July 1964, he went as part of the SEALAB team to Bermuda, where they held training exercises at Plantagenet Bank in of water. While in Bermuda, Carpenter sustained a grounding injury from a motorcycle accident, when he crashed into a coral wall. In 1965, for SEALAB II, Carpenter spent 28 days living on the ocean floor off the coast of California. He suffered another injury when his right index finger was wounded by the toxic spines of a scorpion fish. SEALAB II coincided with Cooper's Gemini 5 mission, and he and Carpenter held the first conversation between a craft in outer space and one on the ocean floor. Carpenter returned to NASA as Executive Assistant to the Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, then joined the Navy's Deep Submergence Systems Project based in Bethesda, Maryland, as a Director of Aquanaut Operations for SEALAB III in 1967. In the aftermath of aquanaut Berry L. Cannon's death while attempting to repair a leak in SEALAB III, Carpenter volunteered to dive down to SEALAB and help return it to the surface, although SEALAB was ultimately salvaged in a less hazardous way. After failing to regain mobility in his arm after two surgical interventions in 1964 and 1967, Carpenter, suffering from avascular necrosis, was ruled ineligible for spaceflight and further deep-sea missions. He spent the last part