Had to move a bunch of autographed books from the living room to the den, a chore that leaves this old Geezer breathless… I’ve got what’s called COPD. Several trips to the den required lots’a breaks, lots’a coffee. But like all things as I approach 90, I was totin’ armloads of wonderful memories.
I rediscovered Astronaut Walter M. Schirra’s book, “Schirra’s Space” for instance. Wally was one of the first seven astronauts, flew all three early man-in-space missions in the Sixties: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. The only astronaut to accomplish that feat.
After Wally and I left NASA we exchanged letters and visits. We lived just 25 miles apart in Southern California and got together on occasion. During the last six months before he died in 2007 I noticed Wally’s hand was becoming unsteady, a scribble…
And because I’m known as “The Geezer Pilot,” he laboriously signed my copy of his book, “Happy Landings, Geezer.”
Wally’s Apollo 7 mission was the first Apollo flight, which began as back-up for the ill-fated Apollo 1 that killed its crew atop the launch complex a year and a half earlier. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in that fire. Wally’s spacecraft was much improved with a mixed gas environment instead of pure oxygen, which proved to be volatile.
Wally’s Apollo 7 mission in the fall of 1968, with Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham, didn’t go to the moon – they flew an Apollo command module in earth orbit to test its systems. All three crew members had bad colds, probably flu, but hid the symptoms so as not to be pulled off the mission. Wally’s illness was the worst… he was sick as the proverbial dog.
Schirra nearly got scrubbed from his earlier Mercury mission, the third American orbital flight, when he was spotted smoking a cigarette during pre-launch breakfast. The doctors were aghast – Mercury was a pure oxygen spacecraft requiring the crew to pre-breathe oxygen hours before a mission. In a panic, Wally had grabbed an oxygen bottle and sucked on it like a madman, finally satisfying the medical staff he was okay to go. But it was close. Cancelled missions cost taxpayers millions of dollars.
While in command of Apollo 7 Wally was miserable and cantankerous. He refused to conduct some tests, argued with mission control, and treated his crew horribly. The whole world heard a cranky astronaut’s nasally voice from space telling mission controllers to “go to hell” when they chastised him for ignoring some of his experiments. Nevertheless, Apollo 7 was a technical success… it proved that the command module was ready for lunar flight – it helped pave the way for Neil Armstrong’s “One small step.”
But as famous and important as Wally had become, while commanding Apollo 7 he had “crapped in his own mess kit” to use a military vernacular; he had offended NASA’s higher ups – he would never fly a lunar mission.
Today, Apollo 7 systems engineer Walt Cunningham and I are in frequent touch via email, so I am privileged to be able to rekindle those wonderful, historic days at the touch of a keyboard.
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Here’s a short clip of The Apollo 7 Launch: