From Navy pilot to NASA astronaut: Remembering Warner Robins’ Sonny Carter
Editor’s note: This story pulls heavily from a November 1989 article published in the Macon Telegraph by Mitch Clarke, as well as additional Telegraph archive materials and oral history transcripts from NASA.
Manley Lanier “Sonny” Carter Jr. was born in Macon on Aug. 15, 1947.
He died 30 years ago, today: April 5, 1991. He was 43 years old.
Reading a list of Carter’s achievements is enough to impress even the most accomplished among us: professional soccer player, doctor, U.S. Navy flight surgeon, fighter pilot, NASA astronaut.
It’s almost like he knew he had to squeeze an entire life into four short decades. Almost like he knew he was running out of time.
The athlete and the doctor
Carter was born in Macon but considered Warner Robins his home. He grew up rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers and his favorite player, catcher Roy Campanella, throwing pop-ups to himself in his backyard in full baseball gear when there wasn’t a game to play or watch. A file photo printed in a 1989 feature on Carter in the Telegraph shows a smiling youngster with catcher gear and a Warner Robins hat on, a member of the Robins Little League All-Stars.
He graduated from Macon’s Lanier High School in 1965, earned a degree in chemistry from Emory University in 1969 and began pursuing a medical degree. That’s when he was drafted by the Atlanta Chiefs of the North American Soccer League, playing for the 1971 NASL championship runner-ups.
Carter balanced professional soccer with his medical training by reading on the road.
“I always took my books on the road with me and took tests early so I wouldn’t fall behind,” he told the Telegraph in 1989.
Carter married Dana Powell, whom he met at Emory, and they later had two girls, Olivia and Meredith.
He graduated with a medical degree in 1973 and completed an internal medicine internship at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. The next year, he joined the U.S. Navy, following in his father’s footsteps, and completed flight surgeon school. He served tours with the 1st and 3rd Marine Air Wing, according to his obituary in the Washington Post, and flew F-4 Phantoms with the Marine Fighter Attack Squadron out of Beaufort, North Carolina.
He later served as the senior medical officer on the USS Forrestal, the first U.S. supercarrier, and became the first flight surgeon to land a plane on an aircraft carrier. He also attended the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School (of “Top Gun” fame).
Applying to NASA on a whim
It was at the Fighter Weapons School that Carter applied to join NASA “on a whim.” Roughly 5,000 people applied to be part of NASA’s 1984 astronaut class. Carter was one of 17 selected.
His co-workers liked him. He was the DJ of choice at parties due to his “unreal” record collection, according to astronaut Bob Cabana. Astronaut John Blaha told NASA in 2006 that Carter “was just outstanding.”
“On the trips we would fly with as a crew, he was funny, because in his head were the names of songs and singers, and he was always talking about really great artists who sing well and write good music, and then he’d always be talking about movies, too, and actors,” Blaha said. “He was a good person to talk about those kind of things, as well as a very good crew person.”
Carter waited five years to fly in space, launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Nov. 22, 1989 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. The shuttle orbited the Earth 79 times over the course of five days, and landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on Nov. 27. Carter spent 120 hours in space.
He was scheduled to return to space in 1992 on the Discovery.
The crash
Carter’s story, while awe-inspiring, is also tragic.
In January of 1986, Carter helped strap seven of his NASA colleagues into the Space Shuttle Challenger. The shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven astronauts aboard.
He was the last person to see them alive.
“I felt, like most Americans, that we’d lost friends and people who were very valuable to the country,” Carter said in 1989.
It was an understatement, perhaps, from a man who lost seven friends and colleagues in such a terrible way. But this father, Manley Carter Sr., understood his grief.
“I didn’t want to question him about it,” his father said in 1989. “It was very hard on him.”
Five years later, on a clear spring day, Carter was on Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 2311 traveling from Atlanta to Brunswick when it crashed. All 23 people on the plane died, including Carter and former U.S. Sen. John Tower of Texas.
According to a 1991 Associated Press story, the plane crashed shortly before 3 p.m in a wooded area about three miles from the airport.
A “malfunction of the left engine propeller control unit” was the official cause of the crash, according to a report from the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB also chided Atlantic Southeast for overworking its pilots.
It seems a cruel irony that a man who logged 3,000 flight hours, a man who flew fighter jets and landed on aircraft carriers more than 150 times, a man who successfully landed on a California runway in a space shuttle, died as a passenger in a commercial airline crash.
You can find Carter’s name and image across the United States. It’s on the Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center; NASA’s underwater training facility in Houston was named after him; he’s in Emory University’s Athletic Hall of Fame and Georgia’s Aviation Hall of Fame.
His legacy lives on in Macon, too, at Sonny Carter Elementary School on Zebulon Road. It’s motto? “To Challenge the Edge of the Universe.”
Maybe that’s the honor he would have liked the most.
His father told the Telegraph more than 30 years ago that Carter enjoyed visiting schools and talking with students, stressing the importance of math and science.
“He helps kids so much,” the senior Manley Carter said. “I think he is a positive influence on them. He can get down on their level and really talk to them.
“Maybe he never really grew up himself.”
