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thedrifter
05-03-07, 08:51 PM
Astronaut Wally Schirra dead at 84
By Thomas Watkins - The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday May 3, 2007 15:46:28 EDT

SAN DIEGO — Astronaut Walter M. “Wally” Schirra Jr., one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the only man to fly on all three of NASA’s early space missions, died Thursday. He was 84.

Schirra, who commanded the first rendezvous of two spacecraft in orbit, died of a heart attack at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, said Ruth Chandler Varonfakis, a longtime family friend and spokeswoman for the San Diego Aerospace Museum. San Diego Medical Examiner’s investigator Paul Parker said Schirra died at 4:05 a.m.

In 1962, Schirra became the third American to orbit the Earth, encircling the globe six times in a flight that lasted more than nine hours.

He returned to space three years later as commander of Gemini 6 and guided his two-man capsule toward Gemini 7, already in orbit. On Dec. 15, 1965, the two ships came within a few feet of each other as they shot through space, some 185 miles above the Earth. It was the first rendezvous of two spacecraft in orbit.

His third and final space flight in 1968 inaugurated the Apollo program that sought to land a man on the moon.

“With the passing of Wally Schirra, we at NASA note with sorrow the loss of yet another of the pioneers of human spaceflight,” NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement.

“It was impossible to know Wally, even to meet him, without realizing at once that he was a man who relished the lighter side of life, the puns and jokes and pranks that can enliven a gathering,” said Griffin. “But this was a distraction from the true nature of the man. His record as a pioneering space pilot shows the real stuff of which he was made. We who have inherited today’s space program will always be in his debt.”

Mercury Seven astronauts who survive him are John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, and Scott Carpenter.

“He was a practical joker, but he was a fine fellow and a fine aviator,” Carpenter told The Associated Press. “He will be sorely missed in our group.”

Carpenter said he last saw Schirra several months ago but had talked to him as recently as last week.

A Navy test pilot, Schirra initially had little interest when he heard of NASA’s Mercury program. But he grew more intrigued over time and the space agency named him one of the Mercury Seven in April 1959.

Supremely confident, he sailed through rigorous astronaut training with what one reporter called “the ease of preparing for a family picnic.”

He became the fifth American in space when he blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Oct. 3, 1962, aboard the Sigma 7 Mercury spacecraft. The first two American astronauts made suborbital space flights.

“I’m having a ball up here drifting,” Schirra said from space.

At the end of his sixth orbit, Schirra piloted the capsule for a perfect splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

“No one has flown better than you,” then-NASA Administrator James E. Webb told him a few days later.

Although he never walked on the moon, Schirra laid some of the groundwork that made future missions possible.

He liked to stress that NASA never planned to simply send a person to the moon.

“Moon and back,” Schirra would point out. “We did confirm a round trip from the very beginning. And ‘moonandback’ is one word. No hyphens. No commas.”

His Gemini mission represented a major step forward in the nation’s space race with the Soviet Union, proving that two ships could dock in space. Schirra’s Apollo 7 mission in 1968 restored the nation’s confidence in the space program, which had been shaken a year earlier when three astronauts were killed in a fire on the launch pad.

His last space flight, aboard Apollo 7, shot into space in October 1968 atop a Saturn rocket, a version of which would later carry men to the moon. But Schirra and his two fellow crew members were grumpy for most of the 11-day trip. All three developed bad colds that proved to be a major nuisance in weightlessness.

The following year, Schirra resigned from NASA and retired from the Navy with the rank of captain. He had logged 295 hours 154 minutes in space.

“Mostly it’s lousy out there,” Schirra said in 1981 on the occasion of the first space shuttle flight. “It’s a hostile environment, and it’s trying to kill you. The outside temperature goes from a minus 450 degrees to a plus 300 degrees. You sit in a flying Thermos bottle.”

A native of Hackensack, N.J., Schirra developed an early interest in flight. His father was a fighter pilot during World War I and later barnstormed at county fairs with Schirra’s mother, who sometimes stood of the wing of a biplane during flights.

Wally, as he liked to be called, took his first flight with his father at age 13 and already knew how to fly when he left home for the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

After graduation in 1945, Schirra served in the Seventh Fleet and flew 90 combat missions during the Korean War. He was credited with shooting down one Soviet MiG-15 and possibly a second. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Air Medals.

In 1984, he moved to the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, serving on corporate boards and as an independent consultant. His favorite craft became the Windchime, a 36-foot sailboat.

Schirra was inducted into the Naval Aviation Hall of Honor in 2000.

Survivors include his wife, Josephine, daughter Suzanne and son Walter Schirra III.

Associated Press writer Mike Schneider in Cape Canaveral, Fla., contributed to this story.

Ellie