Astronaut Walter Schirra dies at 84

Astronaut Walter Schirra dies at 84

news.yahoo.com

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, has died at the age of 84, NASA officials confirmed Thursday

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A TRUE hero !! He will be missed and his greatness will live on !!

GODSPEED WALTER !

news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Sorry Wally...looks like no one cared....




how sad......
















[edit on 3-5-2007 by Alpha Grey]

I care. I just don't think the younger generation knows who he is or what he did in his life. A true hero and pioneer. He will be sadly missed by the ones of us who was around at that time.

Mercury Rises

They don't make them like that anymore.

May the stars light your way, Captain Schirra.

This is the first I have heard.

Thanks Wally. For everything you did.
And for help laying the groundwork, so that others could be the first to visit another place, in space.

Wally's Wiki (Biography)

I didn't know that he won an Emmy Award for his TV Broadcast from Inside Apollo 7.

thats pretty cool.

RIP Wally

[edit on 4-5-2007 by spacedoubt]

Wally’s last flight with NASA was in Apollo 7. During that flight Wally got into a running verbal battle with mission control over things he and his crew were being asked to do and he called the flight director’s instructions ‘idiotic’.

On the second day of the mission the crew was supposed to do a live television broadcast. Wally was irritated over a bunch of added work his crew was being asked to do:

Wally: Roger. You’ve added two burns to this flight schedule; you’ve added a water urine dump; we have a new vehicle up here and I tell you this flight TV will be delayed until further discussion until after rendezvous.

Deke Slayton, the astronauts boss took over from Capcom and told Wally to “flip the switch (TV) switch on!”

Wally: We do not have the equipment out, we have not had an opportunity to follow setting, we have not eaten at this point. I still have a cold. I refuse to foul up our lines this way.”

One of the NASA bosses, it was never learned exactly who, announced explosively within mission control that these astronauts would never fly again.

And none of them ever did. It was very unfortunate for all but especially for Cunningham and Eisele who had little choice but to back their Commander.

The fact is that the crew went on to make several TV broadcasts.

Schirra left NASA and went on the lecture circuit. Eisele joined the Peace Corps and died in 1987. Cunningham went to work for private industry.

One of the little known stories about Wally Schirra comes from Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox:

“On Thursday afternoon (January 26, 1967, the day before the Apollo 1 fire) Wally Schirra, the backup for Grissom, was chatting with Shea (head of ASPO) when he came up with an idea. Why didn’t Shea get into the spacecraft himself and go through the countdown test with the crew? That way he could find out what it was like from their point of view. Shea had never done such a thing, but he liked the idea and asked the K.S.C. technicians to wire up a fourth communications loop into 012. Shea went off to dinner with Cate and then finished the evening by having a couple of drinks with Schirra.”

The next morning, Friday the 27th, Shea was at breakfast with the crew when the K.S.C. communications people reported that they couldn’t Rube Goldberg a fourth communications loop in time. There wasn’t a fourth jack in the spacecraft, an extra loop would have to go through the hatch…it was too complicated.”

“Grisson still wanted Shea to be with them in the spacecraft. The practice countdowns hadn’t been smooth enough. Things didn’t flow, and when they said something into their headsets, the spacecraft didn’t get an answer right away. The subsystems didn’t check out as well as they should. “It’s really messy”, Grissom told him. “We want you to go fix it.” But if he couldn’t have a headset, Shea didn’t see the point. “You think I am going to sit at your feet for four hours and not be able to communicate?” Shea told Grissom. “You’re nuts. You go through the test; I’ll go back to Houston and I’ll come back Monday and do it in the simulator with you.”

About 8 hours later Grissom, Chaffe and White burned to death in Apollo 1.

Thanks guys for the posts........funny how to some he almost never existed...but to some of us...he was a legend.


The golden age of space is slowly disappearing.....but not in our minds!