In memory of Walter Schirra

[freeztar]

It seems he lived a good life. As an early astronaut, he paid a great service to mankind. May you find peace Wally!

 

BBC NEWS | Americas | Pioneer US astronaut dies aged 84

[InfiniteNow]

For your listening pleasure:

 

NPR : Astronaut Wally Schirra Dies at 84

 

Click the link.

 

To command the mission, the agency picked Schirra, a Naval officer, a test pilot and an experienced astronaut. The mission was a success, but Schirra was low-key with the crew of the recovery ship that plucked him out of the ocean: "… We went around the world — but to terminate the mission where we wanted to, where our clothes were waiting for us, that was the high point for us."

"It marks the passing of a dear friend, colleague, brother ... and it's a bad time for everybody in the space program."

[Tormod]

Moved to the "News in brief" section...please don't post links to articles elsewhere in our main news categories! :D

[Bahaichap]

RENDEZVOUS

 

Six months before I joined the Baha’i Faith, the then U.S. Navy test pilot, Walter M. Schirra, was named by NASA as one of the seven Mercury Astronauts. It was April 1959. Three and a half years later, On October 3 1962, a month after my pioneering life began in the Canadian Baha’i community, Shirra piloted the six orbit Sigma 7 Mercury flight, a flight which lasted 9 hours, 15 minutes. The spacecraft attained a velocity of 17,557 miles per hour at an altitude of 175 statute miles and travelled almost 144,000 statute miles before re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Recovery of the Sigma 7 spacecraft occurred in the Pacific Ocean about 275 miles northeast of Midway Island.

 

Shirra died yesterday. I received the news while watching television here in Australia at the mid-point in my day of writing and reading. I usually take a break for lunch in the early afternoon about 1 or 2 p.m., watch/listen to some news and get back to the work. As I listened to the report I felt a kinship with Shirra even though he was twenty-two years my senior, had at least three honorary doctorates, a number of major awards, had been inducted into several halls of fame and had business and civic experience that was, to say the least, impressive. I was not in his league. But, still, I felt this kinship with the man and when I heard he had died, it was a cause for reflection. No tears were shed. I had no desire to meet him, talk to him on the phone, write the biography of his life, meet any of his family or indeed excavate in the inner motivations and or the outward experience of this pioneering astronaut.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 May 2007.

 

You were from Hackensack1

and I was from Hamilton, but

what a high-flier you were, Walter!

One of aviation’s Hall of Famers

in your Sigma 7 back in ’62, in ’65

in that Gemini 6 or that first manned

test of an Apollo spacecraft in ’68

for the moon landing-reaching for

the skies! And they say you were

quite the entertainer.2

 

And me, Wally, just one of those

ordinarily ordinary boys from one

of a 1000 towns across this land.

The first to rendezvous in space,

you were--and it was not over,

you said, until you had stopped,

with no relative motion between

the two vehicles.3 I always wondered

what a rendezvous of my soul with its

Source of light was exactly, Wally,

well, you’ve given me a hint.........

 

1 Shirra was born in this New Jersey town on 12 March 1923.

2 “Levity is appropriate in a dangerous trade,” Shirra said to Life magazine

3 Wikipedia, “Walter M. Shirra,” 4 May 2007

 

Ron Price 5 May 2007 (completed: 9 June 2007)

[CraigD]

What I most admire about Schirra is that, counter to the (justified) stereotype of astronauts as committed to fighting tooth-and-nail to get to fly in space, he gracefully switched rolls from astronaut to TV newscaster, where he arguably did as much or more to promote space science and engineering as any of the moon landing astronauts. As I recall (being pretty young at the time of the most famous missions, such as 7/1967’s Apollo 11, my recollection is a bit hazy), having someone on TV who knew the spacecraft inside-out, having flown it in space, really enhanced the coverage of the missions.

 

The former USSR cosmonauts and US astronauts were my childhood heros. Learning of their aging and deaths is a bit saddening, more so because I spent much of my childhood and youth imagining them dieing – if at all - on manned bases on the Moon or other distant worlds, aboard spacecraft or within space habitats.

 

I miss the future depicted in “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Here’s hoping it’s just a decade or two late, not centuries or eternities.