The destroyer quickly settled into the by now familiar cycle of training and upkeep. The only break came in the second week of November, when she served as an alternate recovery ship during the Apollo 4 unmanned capsule flight test. Unfortunately, the crash and loss of a DASH drone marred an otherwise uneventful mission. Misfortune dogged "Carpenter" when another drone crashed on 10 January 1968. Despite those mishaps, however, the ship passed all her inspections early in the year and resumed local operations in March. Departing Pearl Harbor on 29 March, the destroyer proceeded north of Midway on a secondary recovery station for another unmanned capsule flight. On 4 April, "Carpenter"s radar tracked the Apollo 6 capsule as it passed nearly overhead on a trajectory to a safe splashdown near "Bennington".