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
In Mercury, you couldn't translate. You could just change attitude. But you were actually flying it like a flying machine in Gemini.
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.
If the mission didn't succeed, we would have held up the whole program,
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.
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.
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.
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!
You don't raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes.
When people have asked if I'd like to go in the Shuttle, I said you don't get to fly it, except for landing, which I'd love to do. I wouldn't go unless I could command it
Feeling weightless... it's so many things together. A feeling of pride, of healthy solitude, of dignified freedom from everything that's dirty, sticky. You feel exquisitely comfortable... and you feel you have so much energy, such an urge to do things, such an ability to do things. And you work well, yes, you think well, without sweat, without difficulty as if the biblical curse in the sweat of thy face and in sorrow no longer exists, As if you've been born again.
Each test pilot I know considers him, or herself, now that there are women, to be the very best. It's very demeaning to step down the ladder once in a while
I know enough about the moon to know how unpleasant and inhospitable it is. . . . I know enough about Mars to know that you can't live there, you can't settle it. Mars and the moon are two ugly islands. So then, you say, what's the point of going to them? The point is to be able to say I've been there, I've set foot on them, and I can go further to look for beautiful islands.
I had always wanted to go to the Navy. As a young kid, I was intrigued by a Naval Officer with the beautiful brown shoes and sharp gold wings.