Astronaut’s Career Covered the Entire Race to the Moon

By Richard Goldstein THE NEW YORK TIMES

Wally Schirra, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the only astronaut to fly in all three of NASA’s earliest manned space programs — Mercury, Gemini and Apollo — died Thursday in La Jolla. He was 84 and lived in Rancho Santa Fe.

His death, at a hospital in La Jolla, was caused by a heart attack. Schirra, became the fifth American in space and the third American to orbit the Earth when he lifted off from Cape Canaveral in the Sigma 7 Mercury craft in October 1962.

He later took part in the first rendezvous between two spacecraft, in December 1965, flying with Thomas P. Stafford, the mission pilot, when their Gemini 6 craft came within inches of Gemini 7, carrying Frank Borman and James A. Lovell Jr., and orbited alongside it.

On his final mission, in October 1968, Schirra commanded Apollo 7. The Apollo 7 crew, which also included Donn F. Eisele and Walter Cunningham, flew for 163 orbits and provided the first televised pictures from an American spacecraft.

Schirra’s death leaves former Sen. John H. Glenn Jr. and M. Scott Carpenter as the remaining survivors of the original Mercury astronauts, figures celebrated for their courage and, in the eyes of many, for their bravado in forging a new American frontier amid the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.

But for Schirra, who spent more than 295 hours in space, the missions weren’t glamorous.

“Mostly it’s lousy out there,” he said in 1981. “It’s a hostile environment, and it’s trying to kill you. The outside temperature goes from a minus 450 degrees to a plus 300 degrees. You sit in a flying Thermos bottle.” As he told it in The Real Space Cowboys, written with Ed Buckbee, his goal was to be “a hot-shot test pilot, not just a scarf and goggles type, but one who could use his engineering confidence to work on systems and make the best airplane, ever.”

On April 9, 1959, he Glenn, Carpenter, Alan B. Shepard Jr., Virgil I. Grissom, L. Gordon Cooper Jr. and Donald K. Slayton became astronauts.

Schirra specialized in developing life-support systems for the Mercury astronauts, his tasks including testing their pressurized suits.

On Dec. 12, 1965, he and the pilot, Thomas Stafford, were on the launching pad in their Gemini 6 spacecraft atop a Titan II booster rocket when it ignited, then shut down. Instead of ejecting, Schirra chose to remain in the craft. Technicians found that the booster was not about to explode; the problem was a loose electrical plug.

Three days later, the two astronauts lifted off, and in less than six hours they completed their rendezvous with Gemini 7 some 170 miles above the Mariana Islands in the Pacific.

Commanding Apollo 7, which lifted off Oct. 11, 1968, Schirra and two other astronauts tested systems that had been redesigned after the January 1967 Apollo 1 launching pad fire that killed Virgil Grissom and his fellow astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee.

In 1984, Schirra took part in founding the Mercury Seven Foundation, which provides scholarships in science and engineering. On Aug. 1, 1998, he spoke at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston at a ceremony honoring Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who died at 74 the previous month. Schirra told the gathering: “The brotherhood we have will endure forever.”

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