NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Walter "Wally" Schirra, naval aviator, astronaut, and commander of Apollo 7, part 2 of 3

What would you like to do to people who say parking, doing a rendezvous is like parking the car in your garage? Stick their button to simulate and see if they don't sweat. It's a tough, tough task. Oddly enough, one of my favorite memories was the docking phase. We were practicing docking with Gemini 6 with an Agina. I was in this very black room, the 6-axis simulator, the Agina would move and I would move and you'd float back and forth on these air bearings. And suddenly I'm stopped and the guy climbs in the right side because I didn't need my copo with me, Tom Stafford. It was Hubert Humphrey, then vice-president of the United States. They said, what are we doing? I said, well, I'm trying to dock with Agina. Well, go ahead and do that. And said, by the way, can people hear us? No, sir. He said, I need a five minute nap. Would you wake me up at five? I mean, the city felt sound asleep. No, he wasn't doing the rendezvous. I was doing the rendezvous. But it's kind of fun to think, here's the vice-president sitting there, practicing this

thing with me. I had hundreds of hours in that thing, not just a couple of hours riding curves and running my computer drawing graphs. I do thank Mr. Humboldt for figuring out how to do a lunar orbit rendezvous or pitching for it. But I might add, if he hadn't succeeded, we probably would have done an earth orbit rendezvous. We'd have had a very big space station now. Interesting. But the urgency of that committed president to go to the moon and back before that decade was out. He could cause us to do a lunar orbit rendezvous. Now, after the rendezvous, you said you and Stafford were up there basically playing bridge together. I mean, did you ever get tired of just making it look easy? No. In fact, the only time I really got tired was sitting in a Apollo for 11 days. And I got bored. I can't believe people think it's going to be exciting for the whole duration of a long mission. The Germany was fun because it was a little over 24 hours. And we had to go to sleep because we were just physically exhausted. I could recall waking up.

My arms were floating. Oh, no. Get back in here. Because I thought it was going to hit some switches. In Apollo, we put little hoops like croquet wickets above each of the switches so we wouldn't knock the switches in inadvertently. Those are the things we learned in the hard way. But the Germany mission was short and sweet. And that's what fighter pilots liked. They liked to go up and do the mission, get back and land, and start another one. But I'd sit up here and boring holes. So I didn't envy Bournemann level one bit. They couldn't eat out. They're stuck in that little can up there for two weeks. Not enough. Most of the pictures they show of Germany in flight don't have all those raggedy things hanging off the edge, which is the connection panels connected to the booster. And there's old kind of, I said, what are you doing? Your dirty laundry out there? It looks that horrible. Now, describe the complexity of the Apollo spacecraft compared to Gemini. Were you into a whole new world there, Wally? We went into a new world with Apollo. We finally carried a computer on board of magnitude, although it was hard-wired, not really knowing what a hard-wired computer is, but it was made by, of all things, AC spark plug.

Which I think is kind of funny. We got trained and worked with at MIT in Boston. And that was where it was designed, but it was built by AC spark plug. The system had to have 37 stars, which we had to identify, as points of reference to realign this inertial platform. I'll let this thing go by. Okay, cover a second. I'll go back to inertial platform. But that's good. Keep going, though. You want to keep going through that there? Yeah, look at that. Okay. Okay. We had to, we had to realign or check the alignment of the inertial platform by a lining it with one of 37 stars, and we had to use three, much like a navigation fix. So we got to know the constellations quite well, obviously. Then we think, as earthlings, that it's a big sphere of stars, of course, it's not. It's an infinite plane of stars. But we worked out the constellations, so we could look at almost any time in the dark

side around earth and get the proper star. Rather interesting, I was just reminiscing about that recently, we trained initially at Chapel Hill of North Carolina. Then we went to Griffith Park in Los Angeles. By then, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffey, who were alive ahead of us, we were then in the back up, had gone to Griffith Park and convinced this astronomer, curator of this planetary, I can't believe they did that. One of the stars was Navi, the other star was Genoses, and the other star was Regor, and we came out there and said, oh, yeah, Navi, that's, I even spelled backwards, oh, and he said, Regor, is that Roger, yes, and Genoses, is Edited White the second, yes, they sucked this guy in, and he actually believed those were three classic stars we were using to navigate with. You spent a lot of time working on that Apollo spacecraft. Were you happy with it before the fire? Before the fire, I was not happy with the Apollo at all, I thought it was a real turkey. It was sent to the Cape, and I maintained Gus put a lemon on the spacecraft at the

Cape, and his widow said, no, no, he put it on the seminar, I don't know where the hell she got that thought, she wasn't there, but anyway, wherever the lemon went on, it was a lemon. It was sent to the Cape with so many open items, meaning things that had not been completed that we were quite concerned about. The result of it was when the crew was in preparation for the test where they were killed, obviously, by that fire. My crew, Cunningham, Isaac and I had done the same test, but in the normal sea level atmosphere and regular work clothes done in a space suit. I said, Gus, if anything, act strange, get the heck out of there, because I don't like the way it's going. I'll never forget Gus's remarks, and I'll come back to that. That's great. Let's get... Okay, Mark. Tell me what you said to Gus shorting for the test. I said to Gus, after we had debriefed from our so-called sea level normal atmosphere run, on your run, now we're going to have your spacesuits on and everything else, if it doesn't ring well. The sea level, if it's a crack, you can set the ball on.

If it doesn't ring well, get the heck out of there, do something wrong with that thing. We've had a lot of glitches, which means electronic noises, like a circuit breaker popping, this kind of thing. But anyway, I'll never forget Gus in recorded conversation that I wasn't there. I was on route to Houston when the accident occurred, saying, if I can't talk to you guys on the launch bed, how are the heck am I going to go to the moon and back? There was another electronic problem right there. So that compounded itself, of course, to where we lost the three guys on the launch bed. That was tough. Gus was a good friend. Oh, very much so. What went through your head when, here's the test pilot who, he doesn't die in the air, he doesn't type testing the airplane, he dies on the ground. It was an ignominious end. Gus, very close to seven of us, still like brothers, there was four of us who are alive now. But anyway, I would say Gus was nothing, my closest friend was my closest neighbor, he delivered it next door. And we, we did a lot of things together, right? Backed him up on Germany, he backed me up on Germany, and I was backing him up on Apollo.

So you had to work together pretty closely, so you're either like or don't like by then. Losing those three on that pad was a real tough one. Ed White to me looked like an all-American boy who was going to go on to be a four-star general and probably chief of state of the Air Force, Roger Chaffee, hot shot Naval Aviator. I found out in recent years, by the way, when I was visiting President Kennedy at the White House, Roger Chaffee was flying over Cuba during the missile crisis. Interesting little time frame. So here were three real great guys that we lost unnecessarily. But one of the things I really have to make clear, not one of us that I knew of in NASA pointed things at anyone in the division. We collected the blame ourselves. We all felt guilty of making a mistake, thinking that it was the safest it was that we had lucked out, obviously, in Mercury and Germany, with oxygen on the launch pad, and here we were, we got caught. And a lot of people thought it was North American's fault, that was not their fault. We all collectively should take the blame for that.

Do you think that as bad as it was, that the fire may have made it possible for us to get to the moon by Kennedy's deadline? There's no doubt in my mind. We would not have made it to the moon and back with the spacecraft we were working with. It was called a block one. We went to the block two after that, and that's when I flew the first block two spacecraft with a lot of modifications. Some of which I personally got involved in, and others, Frank Bournemann helped a lot, and Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan, John Young, were our backup crew, and the six of us really worked ourselves in Ragged. We had a support crew, Bill Poe, Jack Swigert, and Ron Evans. Oddly enough, Jack Swigert and Ron Evans are gone, as is Don Izzy from my crew. So we worked our butts off, literally, to get that spacecraft ready at the plant. The plant manager, John Patrick Healy, calls me every year on the anniversary of that flight. During the time frame of the flight, saying, thanks, Wally, let me go on to a conversation. What have you been doing?

We play golf together now. A couple other things. A NASA engineer, Fred Peters, also calls the same time frame. We were trying to do our 30th anniversary in October of 1998. My gosh, it's six days when we started. The whole point of it is that warmth developed. When we took the spacecraft to the Cape, it was flown in a big transport plane. John Healy and I went to Indianapolis, and watched the Indianapolis 500. Well, the spacecraft is on route to Florida, and I wrote up the trip report, 250 low-out two orbits. Were you confident by the time, let's get back to the fire for just a second. Go fever. Did go fever have something to do? What was go fever? And did it have something to do with what happened on the pad on January 27th? There are two very bad cases of go fever. One was what now was called Apollo 1, the other one was Challenger. And I think we were so wrapped up in trying to get the same going. Even Gus was wrapped up in getting it going. He over looked probably his proper term.

Some of the problems with that spacecraft, and he succumbed, and NASA succumbed it in a way by thinking everything was okay. Let's keep going. We can fix this later. We can fix this later, and of course we lost it. I think that go fever is what caused Challenger to blow up the head, not tested the solid rockets at that lower temperature and paid the toll again. Every once in a while you see go fever, and it's a very bad, bad habit. Was go fever a common reference in the test pilot language, is that what I call it? Oh, I remember go fever. How early were you first approached about geology? I think the recall is back in 1962, they came to us, and I was then involved with some of the newer things going on in the training program.

We pretty well committed ourselves to what this pressure suit was like, environmental control system was like, which were the areas I was concerned in. I recall being pitched out, we kind of do something about geology. We've got to look at the earth and study it. And it's funny, Gus, 62, my son was then 12, he was born in 1950. We started talking about geology, and he was one of these kids that was all excited about dinosaurs, and brontasaws, sores, and stegosaurus, and all these different little animals. And I could believe that he was getting into that, and Chris, about that same time frame, I was getting interested in what the spaceship earth was. So we started picking up the rudiments of other areas of engineering and science. To put science in his proper perspective though, I can recall after that mercury flight, going to the White House and my wife, son, and daughter were in the Oval Office with then President Kennedy. I was being led to the Oval Office by Robert Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, of course. And he says, I mean, like, come on, we are very interested in having your flight behind you.

Do you have any political affiliations, and I said, well, sir, I should tell you, I'm an engineering test part, I'm becoming something of a scientist. All my decisions are based on fact. I find the transition to politics impossible. Finally, at the end, when you flew seven, did you know that it was over for you, you were going to get out? Did you hope that there was a lunar mission for you, or did you realize that this was a dead end? Why did you get out? The whole Apollo program changed dramatically when we lost the first crew. I was backing that crew up. Actually, my crew and I were assigned the second Apollo flight, which would have been the end of the program for me anyway. But when I took on the first flight as Apollo commander, I had already made a decision and everybody else knew about it in the astronaut corps that he who commanded an Apollo mission never got another one in the series of flights. And that's true. It turned out the only one that got a second flight was Tom Stafford who flew Apollo's Soyuz, not to the moon and back.

Now some have gone to the moon twice, a number have. The result of it was when I made that commitment to flying Apollo 7 prior to the flight, I announced I was going to leave NASA and probably would retire from the U.S. Navy. And I made that decision prior to the flight. I knew it was a dead end and the real problem was, we were talking about a space station and I didn't have time to look at that. I was so busy with Apollo, I couldn't think about the next program or the next program. When I got back, I said, what a heck of a good decision that was. Because all I did from that point on was go through an accident board on a lunar trainer that Neil Armstrong crashed, nothing was his fault, it was the one that had a problem. That was my last thing I did with NASA. Then we started talking a little bit about the space station and a Skylab. And I could say this can be a long, long thing. So that decision to leave prior to Apollo 7 was a pretty sound one. The last thing on 7 and then we'll get the wrap up question. Did you think the attitude in 7, you knew what you were out, you knew what you were doing,

you knew where you were headed, what about Isley and Cunningham? Do you think their career got for shortened because of all that went on in Apollo 7? It's kind of sad the way the flight controllers got the feeling that they were really running the Apollo program. And I had spent years preparing that spacecraft for flight. They would come in and I don't mean to make a controversial point here, but they would get involved maybe four or five months before the flight and go over a lot of details. We would get together with them, but we, gosh, we travel, I remember Gus and I compared Gus Grisman, I compared travel 285 days out of a year on the road. That's scary. We didn't get to see our kids very often, didn't get to see our family, so we were absolutely back to the word committed, committed to that Apollo flight. When people made changes in the flight plan or asked us to do things that were not involved or told us do this or do that and I said, wait a minute, as a flight controller, you have never been hurt falling off your chair, but you're not going to hurt me where I am because

I don't want to fall off this. We had those colds up there. That was a nasty feeling. We had no briefing on what a cold would be like. We ran out of Kleenex tissue almost, we ran out of active fed, both I worked with later. But as I look back on it, we were not too happy up there at camping out like that. So when friction developed, apparently the ground controllers had access to the press before we did, so they explained that we were on the edge of muting. That wasn't the case at all. We just said, we know what we're doing. We have the flight plan worked out. We'll follow it right to the letter. Everything is happening perfectly. The biggest compliment I ever had was from General Sam Phillips, who since died, saying it was 101% mission, and that made me very happy. I could care less about what the flight control was thought. It turned out they were very dear friends. Glenn Loney, one of the guys, thought I was after him, that wasn't the case at all. I just said, please don't push us. And that's when I got to the point we discussed very carefully whether we'd come in without our helmets on, because we were worried about mucus blowing our ears out. It turned out they could have.

We were prepared for every eventuality. Had the helmets within reach, we could put them on within seconds. We knew about the Russian crew that had been lost with their spacecraft coming down without cabin pressurization, without helmets. So all these things were involved. And sadly, and it happened once before, a criss-crap vow that Scott Carpenter would never fly again. And Scott never did. So apparently, Chris made the same statement about cunning him and Isley, which isn't fair. I would like to say, Chris, don't you ever be a flight controller again. And Chris understands what I'm saying. You don't do that publicly. I could talk to us privately later and say, I think you guys probably were off base. What was on your mind? We never had a chance to discuss that. And I think, Chris, is a very dear friend, I respect him very much. Were you sad that Apollo ended when it did, Wally? What do you think? Did we miss an opportunity? I was crushed. When I left the space program, I was canvas to see who I would broadcast within Walter Kronkite. Thank God, one.

He became a very dear friend. And one and I became very close. And I saw the decline of Apollo from 12 on down the line. But for 13, the press lost interest. Then they came back again and watched 14, watched Shepherd hit the ball of miles and miles. But I'll never forget Apollo 15. It had a bad taste because of a stamp problem they have with envelopes. That was an exquisite mission. They're all three Air Force guys. Here's this Navy guy saying that. Beautiful color. We had color in the studio. The rovers running around, they're having a great time up there. It was a beautiful mission. Jan Armstrong, Neil's first wife, calls, said, can't we get some airtime on this? No one's buying it. The advertisers wouldn't pay for the airtime. But I could see the decline of Apollo from 11 all the way down to 17. It was sad. People just wouldn't pay attention to it. And I suspect NASA has to learn. They didn't learn then. They might have learned. But if they don't learn how to sell themselves, they're going to see the space program fall apart again. Do you think we should go back to the moon?

I don't think we can afford to go back to the moon. We don't have a commitment. It's like, been there, done that, I've got a shirt. We won't have a commitment to go to the moon that would cause those people to work over time so hard to achieve that mission. People worked around the clock, right? I'll never forget the Apollo 13 time. I was broadcasting. People worked around the clock on that to try to save Apollo 13. Grumman, the plant was wide open. Every light in the place was on. People would even touch the limber in there hoping to help. That kind of devotion, and that's what it probably was, was devotion to duty. It'd be very hard to recreate. What did Apollo mean to you? It's funny because I was asked to reminisce about Vernon von Braun. And Vernon said one time. But to quarter the moon, once you bring back some pieces of the moon at the quality of investment-grade diamonds, which should be like $40,000 a carrot, it would not pay off. But the knowledge will pay off.

It's a good line. That was a good one. A lot of people might misunderstand why I say block one, block two. The block one was built to do earth orbit only. Not to carry a lunar module, not to be able to go to the moon and back. It was sort of a precursor like the early Mercury, Shepard Fluor Mercury without windows. It had little tiny round windows, but not the big window in front you would look through. That could have been called a block one. The block one had a number of discrepancies that just wouldn't last through a lunar mission. It would probably stay up for a week, maybe, but that's about all. So we had a second series coming along with our urgency of getting Apollo going. North America never made a spacecraft before.

So block one was sort of their test vehicle, and block two would be the production vehicle. The third Apollo command module would be a block two, and that's what we made into Apollo seven. Okay. Great. Let me take a look at the frame. The other story. I'll share one more about it. We all miss Runevon Brown. I saw Runevon last when he broadcasted with me in 1975 with Walter Cronkite. But Runevon, whenever we were at a social event, said, why didn't you tell the astronauts to a astronauts story? Y'all have an eye-town that one. So you have to imagine two spacecraft before any of us did landing on the moon simultaneously. CCCP on one, USA on the other. Hatch opens, a cosmonaut comes out, astronaut comes out, and they walk over to each other. Put the bubble helmets together. Hello, Hans. Hello, Fritz. Now we speak German. Frunta. And we could make them in quantity and make them reliably.

Reliably, might very well do the job. But we were a long way from finding that out. Now, take me back just before Mercury, though, and describe the word astronaut. You were a test pilot. What was the concept of astronaut to you? It's so funny because a lot of people think I volunteered for the space program. I was ordered to Washington, D.C., to sit down and listen to two engineers in a shrink we call the psychologist. Okay, Hans, we just rolled out perfect. But we'll start that again in the next row. Where's Wally's coffee? Let's make sure he's got some. The starboard one. That's good. Thank you. Just black please. His is up there on the... She got there. I even watched her get the proper cup. My cup. His is up there on the top of the cup.