Wally Schirra Dead at 84 88
UglyTool writes "Wally Schirra, the only astronaut to have flown on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, died of a heart attack at a hospital in San Diego. Wallyschirra.com has much more on the man, his life, and his contributions to the American Space Program."
Wally Shirra was an Old School Astronaught badass (Score:2, Funny)
Female astronaughts hardly ever do that for me anymore.
Re:Wally Shirra was an Old School Astronaught bada (Score:3, Funny)
Are Female Astronaughts naughty or was that simply just a misspelling?
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Re:Wally Shirra was an Old School Astronaught bada (Score:4, Insightful)
We've definitely gone from the days when our astronauts were national heroes, and space flights were major news items, to relatively anonymous folks risking their lives to put the next communications satellite in orbit for our corporate masters. Honestly, does anyone here know the name of a current astronaut off the top of their head without doing a search? We need a mission to Mars or something similar sooner rather than later.
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OK, I forgot Huntsville. But the point is, commercial pilots are a bit more evenly distributed throughout the world. I'm sure there are more near me, about an hour's drive north of Chicago's O'Hare Airport, than there are in the middle of Kansas, several hours from a major airport. And I'd the number of astronauts in all of the EU is fewer than the number in Houston.
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I hate to put facts up against your rant - but commercial flights on the Shuttle ended back in the 1980's after the loss of Challenger.
S
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You bought into the propaganda, but don't be upset that other people aren't quite so enthusiastic about self-deception.
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I hear she's doing endorsements for Ass-Go-Nought brand adult diapers.
Astronauts Gone Wild (Score:2)
Just consider the marketing potential...
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I wonder... (Score:1)
RIP, Wally.
- Eddie
In the future (Score:5, Interesting)
Kind of sad. Reminds me that, for some decades, civilians (rich civilians, of course), could cross the north atlantic in less than for hours, and now, well, only the military can do it that fast.
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"Kind of sad" is putting it mildly... (Score:4, Interesting)
It will also be the 37th anniversary of the last moon landing.
Dammit.
If everything goes according to current NASA plans, they'll be back in 2019.
2019!
It might not happen... (Score:4, Interesting)
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I hate this assertion; I hear it all the time and I always think it's a stupid one.
People like yourself judge the apparent success of technology by it's ability to create a gulf between the haves and the have-nots. How sad. Now the price of air travel is steadily dropping; this is a good use of technology. Of cours
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Weel, what you say is a false dilemma, isn't it? Sure it's way more important to have air travel for the masses, but, as an engineer, I think it's also important to have tech challenges like the Concorde and the Apollo program. Research in both programs brought advances in many areas that makes current low-fare transatlantic trips possible. From your post, it seems that some decades ago you would be arguing against planes (elite toys) and advocating
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So? Civilians (of any station) could only do it because it was heavily subsidized by a goverment.
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Hey, Michael Jackson is only about 45, and by the time he, uh, "shuffles off this mortal coil" the Chinese and/or Indians should have a Moon (or Mars) shot completed or at least underway in order to boost national pride.
From a different time (Score:5, Insightful)
We now seem to see a future where human ingenuity is being bent to restrict mankind.
Wally, we need more like you. You will be missed.
Re:From a different time (Score:4, Interesting)
Once Apollo 11 landed on the moon, interest in the space program quickly faded. Even Apollo 13 rekindled it only for the duration of the mission. While spinoff benefits of the program were manifold, these were unintentional. It was a publicity stunt, plain and simple.
War drives Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality is that Our Corporate Overlords don't like true Progress, of the disruptive sort. They like progress, (with the lower-case "p") of the incremental sort, the kind that keeps their guaranteed spot on top, and keeps them making money the same way they made it last year, only more of it. I would propose that most of the time, they're doing their very best to kill disruptive change, or at least slow it to the point where it is no longer disruptive. Microsoft once mentioned "managing the pace of change in the industry," which I would imply to mean managing the pace of change so they can retain their "leadership" role. Even so, every now and then a disruptive innovation like the Internet manages to sneak through. One might argue that now Corporate America is doing everything in it's power to kill the disruptive basics of the Internet, too.
War changes this.
Real War, that is. War like WWII, not war like Viet Nam or Iraq. Real war threatens the very existence of Our Corporate Overlords, because if we lose, they're toast. So when real War happens, the brakes on disruptive innovation are removed, because survival is at stake. As long as you win, you have a chance of retaining your spot on top, and will most likely be alive. If you lose, both are in doubt.
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In the runup to the war in Iraq, it was obvious to me the whole time that we were going to war because the administration had a hard-on for Saddam. The reasons looked faked and trumped up from the start, as far as I was concerned.
Nor was I the only one not fooled. There were plenty of people taken in. We weren't laughing, because it was war, and people were going to die. But it wouldn't have mattered had we laughed or not, or whether any number of us read Slashdot or not. Nor do
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Bill Clinton offers an interesting counter example to your rambling. As far as I can tell, he genuinely wants to make the world a better place.
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Look at it this way... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see that innovation and 'pushing towards the future' gives the average man the same vision of hope anymore. I see two groups that look towards the future with bright eyes. Techies that can't wait for the computers that the future will bring and people who believe that tomorrow will bring an ecologically sound and energy secure future (without a real struggle). The best a lot of us are hoping for is a way to innovate so as to avoid disaster. We are missing the part where we think that we might go beyond a possible disaster into a utopian future.
I think that we can agree that most people don't think that we are going to solve our non political struggles without a painful struggle and sacrifice. We realize that what was our 'manifest destiny' of progress is destroying the world we live in and charging into the future doesn't have that child-like glee anymore.
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We kids knew about the Cold War and all that, but the threat was never any near as real to us as the reality of the pictures of the moon that flashed back during the Ranger program, or the grainy videos we saw on our TV during the Gemini and Apollo missions. We were actually going into outer space and just about every one of us thought we could go there too.
Maybe I'm getting old and a bit cynical, but I just don't see that spark in children today. Maybe it's that we were blissfully naive when I was a
Wally was one person (Score:3, Insightful)
But are talking about Wally here, not NASA. I think the grandparent has every right to be as nostalgic as they want.
There are plenty of people at NASA, then and now, doing things for NASA because it's science and exploration, not because the government wants to build bigger bombs.
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This is a common meme - but there isn't a shred of truth in it. The technologies for (notionally) peaceful boosters and ICBM's diverged right from the start of the space race - and never rejoined. The race was a proxy for technological prowess, granted, but it has little directly to do with nuclear delivery.
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It was and it wasn't, for many reasons not the least one been the fact that such cynical views of the society were not as prevalent as they are now. Perhaps it is some information overload. We as a society became numb to scientific and engineering advances like space flight. Even a trip to Mars will be a less of en event than first man in space or sputnik was.
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We now seem to see a future where human ingenuity is being bent to restrict mankind.
Really? You think that somehow human ingenuity was more noble at that time? I guess you missed the ingenuity of the War in Vietnam, the Pol Pot genocides, Mao's great leap forward, etc., that were going on at the same time. How many people did the space program free and make a better life for during Shira's time? How many poor did it feed? The piece of technology that gave the most people freedom in the 1960s and 1970s in the US was television, not rockets. It was the medium that the civil rights dem
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I've known Wally for many years and he would not hold this against the Military or NASA but to flat out lie about it would offend him. Asbestos was the best that they had to keep people alive. Everyone
Matter of time (Score:5, Funny)
Wally Schirra (Score:2)
May 4th be with him.
The Right Stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
DG
We salute you (Score:1)
Shameless plug (Score:1, Funny)
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Okaaay, how about Rest In Peace [slashdot.org]? Bon voyageee? He might have gotten a chuckle out of it, unlike you humorless so an' soes
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Gut fahrt is German for "Have a nice trip" or something like that. Not sure why he used German but that's beside the point.
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Because, like any true, red blooded American, I find fart jokes funny, and, although it just came to me, it's also in memory of launch pad "Fuhrer"* Gunther Wendt.
*I did not make that up. He was quite the perfectionist.
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We'll also miss his sense of humour (Score:5, Informative)
Much of the book was about the transition of the image of test pilot from "fighter jock", basically a blue-collar, manually-skilled guy who was a "natural stick & rudder man" to the white-collar scientist/robot who lived by the checklist.
Neither was true of anybody, certainly, but at least one story in the book of a flight shared by pioneer Chuck Yeager and new kid Neil Armstrong underscored the difference between the generations.
The Mercury Seven all had to kind of be both to make the cut; command respect from their fellows and the Old Guard in general as natural flyers, and also be respected by the German scientists and Washington bureaucrats running the new space program.
Wally had an irreverent and irrepressable sense of humour that was loved by the old gang and very, very nearly got him shut out by the new, who basically wanted another computer in the capsule, an utterly reliable component with as few "human" characteristics as possible.
Wally helped make sure it was humanity with all its strengths that became "Man in Space".
Only man in all three programs (Score:3, Informative)
Poor guy (Score:1, Troll)
Possibly second? (Score:5, Informative)
One could almost argue for Gus Grissom [wikipedia.org] to be on that list, too. Second Mercury flight, first Gemini flight, and the commander of Apollo 1. Unfortunately, since Apollo 1 burned on the pad before ever leaving the ground, killing Grissom and his two crew, I guess Schirra stands alone.
Re:Possibly second? (Score:4, Informative)
Well Grissom was in the Apollo programme, but strictly speaking it the mission he died in wasn't called Apollo 1 until after the accident. Before that, it was AS-204, and Apollo 1 would have been the flight they went on later. (This is my understanding of it at least, and I welcome corrections.)
An Astronaut's Astronaut (Score:4, Informative)
After Scott Carpenter's near-disasterous Mercury flight (where he nearly exhausted his maneuvering fuel, jeopardizing his life on re-entry, and landing 250 miles off-target), Schirra's Sigma 7 mission put the project back on-course with textbook operation and completion of mission objectives, and was a highlight to the necessity of human input in spaceflight.
In terms of spacecraft history, only John Young can be argued as the most experienced astronaut in terms of number of space flights (6), different spacecraft (4) as well as specific projects (3). He's flown two Gemini missions, flew Apollo 10 as Command Module pilot, flew Apollo 16 as Lunar Module commanding pilot, and flew Space Shuttle Orbiter Columbia on its maiden flight and on STS-6. Jim Lovell has a similar history (having flown in Gemini and Apollo twice), but because of the events of Apollo 13, never walked on the moon, and retired before the Space Shuttle project. The only thing Young hasn't done was Mercury.
Some of you may remember Schirra's commercials on Actifed in the 1970s (which he had to use on Apollo 7 when the astronauts caught a sniffle). I think that was one of the very few astronaut commercials (Sally Ride and Buzz Aldrin have done some, I believe).
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Frank Borman did quite a few in his capacity as CEO of Eastern Airlines. Another astronaut did commercials for Eveready right before they started the Bunny campaign, (though this may have been Schirra). I think Pete Conrad did a couple as well.
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In an odd coincidence, my Dad just sent me a copy of Schirra's book "Schirra's Space" (ISBN 1557507929) a couple of days ago. I haven't even had a chance to read it, but it freaked me out when he died just after I got it in the mail. Looks like an
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Great man and Fraternity brother (Score:1)
one minute... (Score:2)
I wonder if he will be greeted in heaven with (Score:2)
RIP, Jolly Wally.
For being spam in a can (Score:1)
god speed wally (Score:1)
A pioneer gone, but not forgotten (Score:2, Interesting)
May you, Grissom, White, and Chaffee have a grand time catching up on the 'good old days'!