The Big Story: Schirra: ‘Take care of Spaceship Earth’

From The Associated Press

In an Associated Press interview in April, astronaut Walter M. Schirra Jr. who died Thursday at age 84, reflected on what it meant to him to see Earth from space:  “I left Earth three times. I found no place else to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth.'

"I was very impressed with the fact that as I passed over India and China—this was 1962 — clouds of dust and smoke covered both countries very, very extensively, where Africa was fairly clear, which proved to me something was going wrong with the environment even then.

"The subsequent missions, particularly Apollo 7 where I had 11 days, I saw the same cloud effects of dust, dirt and smoke increase immeasurably, to the point where I became quite concerned about the fact that man was making a mess out of our environment.”

   Schirra  was one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the only man to fly on NASA's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

Schirra died of a heart attack at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, said Ruth Chandler Varonfakis, a family friend and spokeswoman for the San Diego Aerospace Museum.

An aviation buff since childhood, known to fellow astronauts for his colorful personality and independent streak, Schirra became the third American to orbit the Earth in October 1962.

 He encircled the globe six times in a flight that lasted more than nine hours.

Americans in space before him were Alan Shepard and Virgil "Gus" Grissom, who flew suborbital flights in 1961, and John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, who orbited Earth earlier in 1962.

 The Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space, putting cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit in April 1961, weeks before Shepard's suborbital trip.

Schirra returned to space in 1965 as commander of Gemini 6 and guided his two-man capsule toward Gemini 7, already in orbit.

On Dec. 15, 1965, the two ships came within a few feet of each other as they shot through space, some 185 miles above the Earth. It was the first rendezvous of two spacecraft in orbit.

His third and final space flight in 1968 inaugurated the Apollo program that the following year put men on the moon.

The former Navy test pilot said he initially had little interest when he heard of NASA's Mercury program. But he grew more intrigued over time and the space agency named him one of the Mercury Seven in April 1959.

Supremely confident, Schirra sailed through rigorous astronaut training with what one reporter called "the ease of preparing for a family picnic."

"He was a practical joker, but he was a fine fellow and a fine aviator," Carpenter recalled Thursday. "He will be sorely missed in our group." Carpenter said he last saw Schirra several months ago and talked to him just a few days ago.

The only Mercury Seven astronauts who survive him are Glenn and Carpenter.

Although he never walked on the moon, Schirra laid some of the groundwork that made future missions possible.

He liked to stress that NASA never planned to simply send a person to the moon.

"Moon and back," Schirra would point out. "We did confirm a round trip from the very beginning. And `moonandback' is one word. No hyphens. No commas."

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. Schirra's Apollo 7 mission in October 1968 restored the nation's confidence in the space program, which had been shaken a year earlier when three astronauts, including Grissom, were killed in a fire on the launch pad.

The Apollo 7 crew shot into space atop a Saturn rocket, a version of which would later carry men to the moon.

But Schirra and his two fellow crewmembers were grumpy for most of the 11-day trip. All three developed bad colds that proved to be a major nuisance in weightlessness.

Survivors include his wife Josephine, daughter Suzanne and son Walter Schirra III.