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In 1984, he moved to the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, serving on corporate boards and as an independent consultant. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Air Medals. He was credited with shooting down one Soviet MiG-15 and possibly a second. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.Īfter graduation in 1945, Schirra served in the Seventh Fleet and flew 90 combat missions during the Korean War.

#Wally schirra how to#

Wally, as he liked to be called, took his first flight with his father at age 13 and already knew how to fly when he left home for the U.S. His father was a fighter pilot during World War I and later barnstormed at county fairs with Schirra’s mother, who sometimes stood of the wing of a biplane during flights. You sit in a flying Thermos bottle.”Ī native of Hackensack, N.J., Schirra developed an early interest in flight.

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The outside temperature goes from a minus 450 degrees to a plus 300 degrees. “It’s a hostile environment, and it’s trying to kill you. “Mostly it’s lousy out there,” Schirra said in 1981 on the occasion of the first space shuttle flight. He had logged 295 hours 154 minutes in space. The following year, Schirra resigned from NASA and retired from the Navy with the rank of captain. All three developed bad colds that proved to be a major nuisance in weightlessness.

But Schirra and his two fellow crew members were grumpy for most of the 11-day trip. His last space flight, aboard Apollo 7, shot into space in October 1968 atop a Saturn rocket, a version of which would later carry men to the moon. Schirra’s Apollo 7 mission in 1968 restored the nation’s confidence in the space program, which had been shaken a year earlier when three astronauts were killed in a fire on the launch pad. His Gemini mission represented a major step forward in the nation’s space race with the Soviet Union, proving that two ships could dock in space. “We did confirm a round trip from the very beginning. “Moon and back,” Schirra would point out. He liked to stress that NASA never planned to simply send a person to the moon. “He will be sorely missed in our group.”Ĭarpenter said he last saw Schirra several months ago but had talked to him as recently as last week.Īlthough he never walked on the moon, Schirra laid some of the groundwork that made future missions possible. “He was a practical joker, but he was a fine fellow and a fine aviator,” Carpenter said Thursday. Mercury Seven astronauts who survive him are John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, and Scott Carpenter. “No one has flown better than you,” NASA Administrator James E. “I’m having a ball up here drifting,” Schirra said from space.Īt the end of his sixth orbit, Schirra piloted the capsule for a perfect splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.