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Wally Schirra Dead at 84

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the rare-breed-of-heroes dept.

UglyTool writes "Wally Schirra, the only astronaut to have flown on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, died of a heart attack at a hospital in San Diego. Wallyschirra.com has much more on the man, his life, and his contributions to the American Space Program."

11 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wally Shirra was an Old School Astronaught bada by eviloverlordx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Or even an 'Astronaut'.

    We've definitely gone from the days when our astronauts were national heroes, and space flights were major news items, to relatively anonymous folks risking their lives to put the next communications satellite in orbit for our corporate masters. Honestly, does anyone here know the name of a current astronaut off the top of their head without doing a search? We need a mission to Mars or something similar sooner rather than later.

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  2. From a different time by Gription · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wally excelled in quite a different era. It was a time where men were creating a new type of future where anything was possible with the application of human ingenuity and effort. He was a shining example of this stage of history.

    We now seem to see a future where human ingenuity is being bent to restrict mankind.

    Wally, we need more like you. You will be missed.

    1. Re:From a different time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      We now seem to see a future where human ingenuity is being bent to restrict mankind. Really? You think that somehow human ingenuity was more noble at that time? I guess you missed the ingenuity of the War in Vietnam, the Pol Pot genocides, Mao's great leap forward, etc., that were going on at the same time. How many people did the space program free and make a better life for during Shira's time? How many poor did it feed? The piece of technology that gave the most people freedom in the 1960s and 1970s in the US was television, not rockets. It was the medium that the civil rights demonstrations reached the average American.

      Fast forward to today. Now we have the infrastructure that the Internet is allowing billions of people to have freedom of expression online when their governments restrict them elsewhere. And not surprisingly, the governments try to restrict them online as well. But the essential point isn't that technology is being used by repressive governments, it is that more people than ever before have the ability to communicate their ideas (even with repression). More freedom of though has been brought about by the Internet than any invention since the printing press. Yet you seem to think that the world is becoming more repressed.

      This is what I hate about optimists and pessimists. The optimists think something trivial like the space program will free the world and the pessimists see something new like the Internet and only seeing it oppress people even if it has given freedoms that never existed before.
    2. Re:From a different time by DerekLyons · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Let's not get too nostalgic. The whole point of the space race was as a proxy for the Americans and Soviets to one-up each other in their nuclear delivery capacity.

      This is a common meme - but there isn't a shred of truth in it. The technologies for (notionally) peaceful boosters and ICBM's diverged right from the start of the space race - and never rejoined. The race was a proxy for technological prowess, granted, but it has little directly to do with nuclear delivery.
  3. Re:Wally Shirra was an Old School Astronaught bada by Chosen+Reject · · Score: 2, Insightful

    We've definitely gone from the days when our pilots were national heroes, and trans-oceanic flights were major news items, to relatively anonymous folks risking their lives to put the next group of people in another country for our own entertainment. Honestly, does anyone here know the name of a current pilot who's flown across the Atlantic off the top of their head without doing a search? We need a mission around the globe or something similar sooner rather than later.

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  4. The Right Stuff by DG · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Thus passes a man who truly had the Right Stuff.

    DG

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  5. War drives Progress by dpilot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'll give you a different, and possibly Slashdottian perspective on the "War drives Progress" model you proposed.

    The reality is that Our Corporate Overlords don't like true Progress, of the disruptive sort. They like progress, (with the lower-case "p") of the incremental sort, the kind that keeps their guaranteed spot on top, and keeps them making money the same way they made it last year, only more of it. I would propose that most of the time, they're doing their very best to kill disruptive change, or at least slow it to the point where it is no longer disruptive. Microsoft once mentioned "managing the pace of change in the industry," which I would imply to mean managing the pace of change so they can retain their "leadership" role. Even so, every now and then a disruptive innovation like the Internet manages to sneak through. One might argue that now Corporate America is doing everything in it's power to kill the disruptive basics of the Internet, too.

    War changes this.

    Real War, that is. War like WWII, not war like Viet Nam or Iraq. Real war threatens the very existence of Our Corporate Overlords, because if we lose, they're toast. So when real War happens, the brakes on disruptive innovation are removed, because survival is at stake. As long as you win, you have a chance of retaining your spot on top, and will most likely be alive. If you lose, both are in doubt.

    --
    The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
    1. Re:War drives Progress by dpilot · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Laugh and point all you want.

      In the runup to the war in Iraq, it was obvious to me the whole time that we were going to war because the administration had a hard-on for Saddam. The reasons looked faked and trumped up from the start, as far as I was concerned.

      Nor was I the only one not fooled. There were plenty of people taken in. We weren't laughing, because it was war, and people were going to die. But it wouldn't have mattered had we laughed or not, or whether any number of us read Slashdot or not. Nor does it matter if you point and laugh, or read Slashdot.

      People with power, even incompetent people with power, do as they want, and the first thing they want is to stay in power.

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      The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
  6. Look at it this way... by Gription · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In the 50s 60s and 70s we all believed that it was possible to work and innovate to create a world where the future was bright and full of possibility. We knew our world was full of atrocities and we lived under the cloud of Mutually Assured Destruction, but we really believed that it was possible to beat those enemies and if we created enough we could make a world where 'it all would be better'.

    I don't see that innovation and 'pushing towards the future' gives the average man the same vision of hope anymore. I see two groups that look towards the future with bright eyes. Techies that can't wait for the computers that the future will bring and people who believe that tomorrow will bring an ecologically sound and energy secure future (without a real struggle). The best a lot of us are hoping for is a way to innovate so as to avoid disaster. We are missing the part where we think that we might go beyond a possible disaster into a utopian future.

    I think that we can agree that most people don't think that we are going to solve our non political struggles without a painful struggle and sacrifice. We realize that what was our 'manifest destiny' of progress is destroying the world we live in and charging into the future doesn't have that child-like glee anymore.

  7. Wally was one person by hellfire · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I see your point in terms of the government, NASA and the whole space race.

    But are talking about Wally here, not NASA. I think the grandparent has every right to be as nostalgic as they want.

    There are plenty of people at NASA, then and now, doing things for NASA because it's science and exploration, not because the government wants to build bigger bombs.

    --

    "All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"

  8. Re:Wally Shirra was an Old School Astronaught bada by kamapuaa · · Score: 2, Insightful
    That you knew the astronaut's names was purely a matter of how it was marketed. The astronauts didn't design the rockets, and they weren't the ones making decisions. They were interchangeable, and any one of them (or all of them), could easily have been replaced, even at the last minute.

    You bought into the propaganda, but don't be upset that other people aren't quite so enthusiastic about self-deception.

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