Wally Schirra
Wally Schirra
Walter Marty "Wally" Schirra, Jr.,, was an American naval officer and aviator, aeronautical engineer, test pilot, and one of the original seven astronauts chosen for Project Mercury, United States first effort to put humans in space. He flew the six-orbit, nine-hour Mercury-Atlas 8 mission on October 3, 1962, becoming the fifth American, and the ninth human, to ride a rocket into space. In the two-man Gemini program, he achieved the first space rendezvous, station-keeping his Gemini 6A spacecraft within 1...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAstronaut
Date of Birth12 March 1923
CityHackensack, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
John's going to get some unbelievable surprises, ... Some people get quite sick in space and it's quite normal. It's not a macho thing -- it's something that can happen.
I have fought the centrifuge ever since. When I visited Star City in Russia, I told them, you guys don't need a centrifuge, they are a waste of time.
Within NASA, there were lots of things that were not appropriate to bring out to the public, because the press did not handle it well.
We have managed to hang in for 55 years, which isn't bad. My wife says our marriage has lasted so long because I was away half the time!
At the end of our NASA careers, no one had a place for us in the military.
I saw the booster, not Sputnik, flying by, and I said, maybe this is the way we should be going, not just sitting back waiting for something to happen.
This morning I drove the back roads to our Mercury launch pad, Complex Fourteen. There was a plaque with all our names on it. Now anyone who is happy to see his name engraved in marble really has something to worry about.
Apollo was just too big, like flying a big transport airplane, which fighter pilots don't really revere. Gemini was just about the right size.
As a Naval officer, I was trained, essentially bred, to be a military aviator. I was a Naval officer on assignment, not an employee of NASA.
After the Apollo 1 crew was lost, we said that we wore a black armband for a few weeks, and we wear it in our hearts forever.
If the mission didn't succeed, we would have held up the whole program,
In Mercury, you couldn't translate. You could just change attitude. But you were actually flying it like a flying machine in Gemini.
I liked that the book brought von Braun to the surface. People didn't know much about him. He was a very gracious man who did some amazing things.
I left Earth three times and found no other place to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth.