May 03, 2007
SPACE COWBOY, R.I.P.
There were three things I obsessed about as a young boy: Abraham Lincoln, the Kennedy assassination and space exploration.
The first one I have no clue to the origin. The second I think had something to do with my grandmother giving me Kennedy half-dollars as reward for doing this or that around her hotel or taped to the inside of a birthday card. I remember asking her one day in her hotel office as she sat behind the PBX switchboard, "Why would they shoot anyone who's on a coin?" I may have been the only 10-year-old to read the Warren Commission Report cover to cover.
The third, well, that was easy. I lived in the only state from which they shot rockets into space. You could see the contrails of rockets launching across the peninsula from where I went to high school. I read everything I could find about the Mercury 7 astronauts. I drank up vacation visits to Cape Kennedy (thereby mixing my two obsessions). During the time I was a Cub Scout leader when Salad Boy was smaller, I could barely sleep during a camp-in we got to have sleeping under a Saturn V mockup at the Kennedy Space Center. For a space nut, that was big stuff.
So it was a bit sad to watch another member of the original astronaut corps pass away this week. Wally Schirra died at age 84 early Thursday at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.
Now, I wasn't alive for the Mercury or Gemini programs. I only remember the end of the Apollo program. (I can still remember watching black-and-white transmissions from the moon in the early 1970s.) The first big space event I got into: the wasteful, expensive P.R. mission known as Apollo/Soyuz. Talk about coming late to the party. From there it was downhill to Skylab and well, you know the rest.
But I fixated on astronaut Wally Schirra. Why?
Because Wally didn't take no jive.
Case in point: After his successful Mercury flight, Schirra's second launch into space began on December 15, 1965 as command pilot aboard Gemini GT-6A. The mission was intended to perform the first rendezvous and docking between different spacecraft, a vital prerequisite for missions to the moon, but the unmanned Agena target for Gemini 6 failed to reach orbit on October 25, 1965. Gemini 6 was removed from the pad and replaced by Gemini 7, which was launched on December 4, 1965, on a planned 14-day flight. Gemini 6 was redesignated Gemini 6-A.
Eight days later, Schirra and pilot Thomas P. Stafford were in their spacecraft atop the Titan II booster when it ignited, then shut down after only two seconds. Rather than eject himself and Stafford, Schirra chose to remain in the spacecraft while technicians confirmed that the booster was not going to explode.
Wally. Had. Jumbo. Coconut. Elephantits. Balls. Of. Steel.
In 1968, Schirra was named commander of Apollo 7, a test-run for future missions that included Donn Eisele as command module pilot and Walt Cunningham the lunar module pilot (even though there was no lunar module to pilot).
Theirs was the first manned mission after the tragedy of Apollo 1, which burned up on the pad during a test in 1966, killing Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee inside the capsule.
NASA had just spent two years gutting itself to find the flaws in its tangled organization. The agency was already getting heat from two ends: from those who wanted to kill the program for safety concerns and cost overruns and from the legacy of the assassinated president who ordered them to reach the moon by 1970.
Schirra knew that another deadly mistake would likely kill the country's space program.
As Cunningham remembered:
“The first Apollo mission was originally scheduled to be flown by Gus Grissom and his crew two years earlier in the first manned spacecraft ever built by the Rockwell Corporation. At that time Wally was planning to leave the space program for a job in private industry. Only a personal appeal by his old friend and good neighbour, Gus (Grissom), convinced Wally to stay on as his back-up. While Wally never got excited about playing second fiddle to anyone, Donn and I were overjoyed just to be ON a back-up crew – any back-up crew. And we certainly never expected to actually fly the first mission.A few short months later we lost our three close friends in a spacecraft fire on the launch pad and inherited their key mission – the first giant step towards landing a man on the moon. With a new motivation and challenge in front of him, Wally committed another two years to the job.”
Another sign of his commitment to the task at hand: He also had handed in his resignation from NASA two weeks before the mission, saying he wanted to quit while he was ahead, and he wanted it to be clear that he was single-minded about the Apollo 7 mission – that he cared for nothing else. It cost him a chance to walk on the moon. Apollo 7 was an orbital flight. Wally didn't give a shit. He had a job to do.
As the story goes, Schirra took his crew, the back-up crew and all the support crew to a borrowed house in Miami as the Apollo 1 investigation was ending. To get their minds off the fatal accident they cut all communication with the outside world and conducted intense training sessions to fit their responsibilities into the upcoming schedule. He decided then that he wasn’t going to be influenced by extraneous scientific and political interests. He would not tolerate anything or anyone that would affect the safety of the mission or the crew.
Flight director Chris Kraft once described him as "raising hell, bitching and hollering about everything."
When told, for example, that there would be no coffee on the spaceship, he lost his mind.
"You’re asking a Navy guy to give up coffee," he screamed.
At one top brass conference in Houston, during the break the refreshment trolley was wheeled in without any coffee. In response to the outrage he got up and said, “Gentlemen, since you deem it inappropriate for the crew of Apollo 7 to drink coffee during the mission, I thought you might try doing without it for just one day.”
Wally made his point. He got his coffee.
So what did the hard-nosed guy, the only one at that point to have flown into space on three different vehicles, do on launch day?
He screamed "Yabba-Dabba-Doo!" as the first engines made their burn.
Schirra, at age 45, was the oldest astronaut at the time to enter space.
But in his biggest moment, at the most stressful time of his entire career, at the minute when everything about the program and American space exploration hang in the balance, Wally became a little boy again.
I dug that. A lot.
During the Apollo 7 mission, Schirra caught what was perhaps the most famous cold in NASA history. He took Actifed to relieve his symptoms upon the advice of the flight surgeon. Years later, he became a spokesman for Actifed and would appear in television commercials advertising the product. (You can see the ad below.)
But Schirra is important for another reason: He should have been the first man on the moon instead of Neil Armstrong.
What killed that plan? Probably his bitching about coffee.
In his book "Moondust" about the men who walked on the moon, author Andrew Smith writes:
And here is where Armstrong's predicament gets peculiar, because - and this is a little known fact - all the evidence is that his elevated place in history is an accident. Deke Slayton [who was in charge of the Astronaut Corps and decided who went into space and in what order] wanted the first step to be taken by one of his Mercury 7 buddies, favoring Gus Grissom. Then, after Grissom died int he Apollo 1 fire, it was Wally Schirra - but Schirra's grouchy command of Apollo 7, the nervy first manned flight after the fire, ruled him out. [Apollo 11 command module pilot] Mike Collins thought it would be Ed White, America's first spacewalker, who unfortunately perished alongside Grissom. Collins also mused: "It is interesting to note that Neil Armstrong was the last in his group to fly. Were they saving the best for last, or was his selection as the first human to walk on another planet a fluke?" The evidence suggests that it was."
It's trite to say that they don't make them like Wally Schirra anymore, but they don't. We're a nation of calculated risk now, not a nation of commitment and purpose. We're going back to the moon, supposedly, to start a base there. Schirra hated the idea. He wanted us to go to Mars from Earth. "We've already been to the moon!" he said. Schirra didn't believe in risk for risk's sake or foolhardy ventures. But he also thought that baby steps were a waste of time.
Thirty nine years ago, he strapped himself atop a 363-foot missile with almost 9 million pounds of combined thrust in its engines. He was sitting in a remodeled version of a vehicle that had caught fire before it ever left the ground and killed three of his friends. It was the largest rocket any man had ever ridden up to that point. It had 3 million parts that had never worked correctly with men inside.
And Wally didn't blink. After all, he had his coffee onboard.
Salute him and his kind now, folks. There aren't many left where he came from.