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Wally Schirra Dead at 84
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."
Female astronaughts hardly ever do that for me anymore.
;)
Are Female Astronaughts naughty or was that simply just a misspelling?
Actually, he probably was in his younger days. Had the honor of meeting him once when I was a reporter. This was around 10 years ago and you wouldn't believe the number of women flocking around him to hear his stories ...
Bark less. Wag more.
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.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Altough he didn't walked in the moon in his Apollo mission, his death made me think if there will be a time when, as before, no living person had actually went to some other world. With no moon mission schedulled by any nation capable of it, and the ageing of Apollo astronauts (it's almost 4 decades since the landings after all), it seems possible that in some point in the future we will have no moon walkers among us.
Kind of sad. Reminds me that, for some decades, civilians (rich civilians, of course), could cross the north atlantic in less than for hours, and now, well, only the military can do it that fast.
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.
I told you that being an astronaut is dangerous.
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Thus passes a man who truly had the Right Stuff.
DG
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In "The Right Stuff", Tom Wolfe noted that Shirra was the one who almost laughed himself out of the space program.
Much of the book was about the transition of the image of test pilot from "fighter jock", basically a blue-collar, manually-skilled guy who was a "natural stick & rudder man" to the white-collar scientist/robot who lived by the checklist.
Neither was true of anybody, certainly, but at least one story in the book of a flight shared by pioneer Chuck Yeager and new kid Neil Armstrong underscored the difference between the generations.
The Mercury Seven all had to kind of be both to make the cut; command respect from their fellows and the Old Guard in general as natural flyers, and also be respected by the German scientists and Washington bureaucrats running the new space program.
Wally had an irreverent and irrepressable sense of humour that was loved by the old gang and very, very nearly got him shut out by the new, who basically wanted another computer in the capsule, an utterly reliable component with as few "human" characteristics as possible.
Wally helped make sure it was humanity with all its strengths that became "Man in Space".
All those things combine to make commercial aviation much more "routine" to the public than spaceflight.
Schirra was the only astronaut to fly missions for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. And the Apollo flight he commanded, which was the first one after the pad fire that killed the crew of Apollo 1, was conducted at a time when a lot of the astronauts still considered the Apollo craft to be a death trap. But they still went, and it was the success of their test flight that gave NASA the confidence to send the second manned Apollo mission all the way to lunar orbit in 1968.
Wally Schirra, the only astronaut to have flown on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions....
One could almost argue for Gus Grissom to be on that list, too. Second Mercury flight, first Gemini flight, and the commander of Apollo 1. Unfortunately, since Apollo 1 burned on the pad before ever leaving the ground, killing Grissom and his two crew, I guess Schirra stands alone.
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.
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.
The year 2009 will be the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.
It will also be the 37th anniversary of the last moon landing.
Dammit.
If everything goes according to current NASA plans, they'll be back in 2019.
2019!
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Since many posts have taken the opportunity to take pot-shots and cheap jokes about the astronaut program, I'll take time to recommend one docudrama on this astronaut's fine history: HBO's "From The Earth to the Moon" has a beautifully comprehensive episode called "We Have Cleared The Tower" on the events of getting the first Apollo test launch in space, and Wally's efforts to keep "Go Fever" from causing many of the same problems on his Apollo 7 that ultimately killed the Apollo 1 crew. Mark Harmon plays Schirra, and there are many good performances that fairly accurately detail the training, launch setup and pre-flight.
After Scott Carpenter's near-disasterous Mercury flight (where he nearly exhausted his maneuvering fuel, jeopardizing his life on re-entry, and landing 250 miles off-target), Schirra's Sigma 7 mission put the project back on-course with textbook operation and completion of mission objectives, and was a highlight to the necessity of human input in spaceflight.
In terms of spacecraft history, only John Young can be argued as the most experienced astronaut in terms of number of space flights (6), different spacecraft (4) as well as specific projects (3). He's flown two Gemini missions, flew Apollo 10 as Command Module pilot, flew Apollo 16 as Lunar Module commanding pilot, and flew Space Shuttle Orbiter Columbia on its maiden flight and on STS-6. Jim Lovell has a similar history (having flown in Gemini and Apollo twice), but because of the events of Apollo 13, never walked on the moon, and retired before the Space Shuttle project. The only thing Young hasn't done was Mercury.
Some of you may remember Schirra's commercials on Actifed in the 1970s (which he had to use on Apollo 7 when the astronauts caught a sniffle). I think that was one of the very few astronaut commercials (Sally Ride and Buzz Aldrin have done some, I believe).
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
The youngest moon walker (Harrison Shmitt; Apollo 17) will be 84 in 2019. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin will be 89. There's a good chance at least one Apollo moon walker will survive to see mankind return to the moon.