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05/03/2007: "Smooth Sailing, Wally"
When I was growing up, nothing personified all that was good about America and Americans like the astronauts. These guys bolted themselves to the nose of a rocket - a rocket, for God's sake - and smiled as they lit the fuse. The right stuff indeed.
Long before the popular image of an astronaut was a crazy woman driving cross country in a diaper, there were the original group of astronauts - the Mercury 7. Famous long before they flew into space, they captured the imagination of America at a time when we desperately needed heroes. Their every move was documented by an adoring press who made them the most recognizable faces in America.
Time, sadly, catches up with us all, and today we lost another of the group. Wally Schirra was a serious pilot, and was the astronaut NASA turned to when a serious performance was needed. After Scott Carpenter nearly ran his capsule out of fuel while sightseeing on orbit, Schirra flew a textbook mission that returned to Earth with more fuel than any other mission. Even the name of the capsule - Sigma 7 - echoed the precise nature of its pilot. Later, when America was still grieving the loss of the crew of Apollo 1 in a launch pad fire, it was Schirra who commanded the first successful Apollo mission, testing out the flight hardware and paving the way to the moon.
My strongest memories of Wally Schirra were of his time spent with Walter Cronkite cohosting the television coverage of space launches. He had the scientific background to understand the most difficult situation and the down home manner to explain it in a way we could all follow. He helped bring home the majesty of space flight in a memorable fashion.
With Schirra's death earlier today of a heart attack at 84, only John Glenn and Scott Carpenter remain of that first group. Time will soon enough take them as well, but time cannot erase their heroic actions. Every subsequent flight has built upon their foundation, and hundreds of years from now, their names will still be learned by schoolchildren - perhaps in a school on the moon or Mars. That will be the real legacy of Wally Schirra.
