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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't go along with going to Moon first to build a launch pad to go to Mars. We should go to Mars from Earth orbit. We have already been to the Moon; we've already practiced.
Levity is the lubricant of a crisis. We resort to jokes, pranks and good natured kidding to relieve tension, stress and boredom.
A little levity is appropriate in a dangerous trade.
Kennedy had made a mess in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. He had to do something to look good. The Apollo program of going to the Moon was quite a goal,