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
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.
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.
A little levity is appropriate in a dangerous trade.
He who commands an Apollo flight will not command a second one
Some of the wives didn't keep up with the program. It started breaking apart during the Apollo days.
Apollo was a big, unwieldy vehicle. I had a problem with the flight controllers over that. It would try to fare its way like an airplane.
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.
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.