NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Walter "Wally" Schirra, naval aviator, astronaut, and commander of Apollo 7, part 1 of 3

I've continued on World 95, Wally Sharah. Reminiscing about where I was when Kennedy made that unbelievable announcement that we'd grow the moon and back. He did say, and back, a lot of people leave that out and do other hard things or difficult things. I do recall seeing that, and I'm not sure where it was. It had to be in Virginia because we hadn't moved to Houston at that point in time, but just shortly after Shepard did his five minute zero G total of about 14-minute flight. And we were going to think, my gosh, we're going to go to the moon and back. We haven't even orbited yet. How do we do this? And of course, we didn't know how to do it. We had a lot of variables that we had to face. We were coming out here where I am now in San Diego at our air and space museum wondering about, what's this atlas thing? I thought that was an intercontinental ballistic missile. And we're going to the top of that thing. These guys are out of their minds. That we were talking about capsule. We said, let's change the word capsule to spacecraft. We don't like the name capsule. And yet, when people talk to the shuttle, even today, they say that the Capcom is calling the shuttle.

We were stuck with that. So apparently, Capcom will go through many more generations. But I can recall how Shepard had a metal pin around him by President Kennedy. The President dropped it. Shepard said something. And Kennedy says, let's hit the ground harder than you did. They got the metal back up again and got out and properly decorated. But the fun of that visit at the White House was so surprising later than that, not much of a few weeks that's very cool, where he made that commitment. And that's the word I like to use. I made a commitment to going to the moon and back. Did you think we had the technology to do it, were you confident it could be done in the time period? I mean, how are you going to ride that thing? I don't think we had any confidence in that statement. It was a commitment. And I think, I tend to want to overuse the word commitment. But the real key to what we had was a young committed president, which is an oxymoron. We haven't had a committed president, not only a young committed president, since Kennedy. Reagan and Bush talked about going back to the moon and on to Mars, and it went right down the drain.

Clinton visited the Cape when John Glenn got launched in the shuttle. That's probably the only commitment we're going to see from him. Not that I'm criticizing any of these men, but we need a national leader to say this nation will send a man to the moon and back within this period of time. And that grew the whole country together. Everyone who worked on the program was sure we could do it. We weren't sure how. We're going to go ahead and start. I think we had fired the F-1 engine once at Rocketdyne, outside of Los Angeles, prior to that time frame. We knew that engine if it were workable, 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 at test pilot. What was the concept of astronaut? I didn't even know the term astronaut. Let alone... Spaceman, I knew I heard about Buck Rogers and Jules Verne, but I can recall very vividly being ordered to Washington, DC.

I was a hot shot test pilot at Patuxen River, Maryland, in the Naval Test Center. Arrived there, and they had two engineers and a shrink on the stage, psychologists, allegedly, trying to get us excited about going into space. They said, no, what can do... What we'll do with you is put you on top of this rocket and a capsule. A capsule, capsule. I want out of here. Where's the no-desk? The funny part of it is that I was thinking about those idiots that were in Bonham and Bailey Circuit, the big cannon, they'd launch them out of that into a net, and they'd splot in the net and they'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, send those people. That's great. Then they went on. I couldn't believe they went on. They tried to convince them it was a good idea because they could see a lot of blank stairs. Mine, I want to get that out of the room. One minute time frame. Can you splice? No. Okay. I'll pick up... Okay. Yeah. I want to get out of that room. Then they said, don't worry. We're going to send monkeys and chimpanzees first. I knew I wanted out of that room. This was absolutely ludicrous. Of course, it went on that way.

But then my peer group said, no, look, if you want to go higher, farther, and faster, what other way than this? And here I was, I mocked too jockey at that point. And I probably got about 55, 60,000 feet, not that anybody knew it then. I'm past the statute of limitations now. You were limited to 50 without a precious suit. The result of it was, I said, okay, I'll go ahead and take these tests. And I was just in Albuquerque recently thinking about Dr. Lovelace, the Lovelace clinic, who ran these exhaustive tests on us, the seven of us. It was there I really flipped over Pete Conrad, who I knew Pete and Jim Lovel and I were in the same test part at school class. And Pete was our comedian. I thought I was pretty good, but Pete topped us all. He was really funny. Probably the best memory I have of Pete Conrad, they gave us this Rorschach test, where you give him inkblot and a mirror image, you look at it, and that was Felix the cat run over by a steam roller. And the last card they give you individually, each test is a blank white card. Pete takes it. Sub-side down, hands it back. The shrink didn't know what to do with it. Overall, how do you feel about the doctors, where you well patients being looked at?

We were well patients being looked at by sick doctors. But the sad thing is, if they had had the presence of mind, which they should have had, and I finally, I guess, developed the thought many years later, and it may have come out of the shuttle time frame. They needed to have a baseline from which they could see a minor departure. And that's kind of what they're playing with with the John Glenn thing. They had this baseline, as we all have. And over the years, things changed, but the subtlety of those changes might show again on a space flight. That wouldn't have to justify John's flight, but it was interesting, anyway. What were the afraid of sending you guys into space? Before Alan went up, before John went into his first orbit, what were the afraid might happen to you guys? I think they were afraid of the physiological problems, whether we could drink, eat, whether our eyes would change, whether we could hear, whether we'd become space sick or C-sick. And it was so funny to say, where I live in San Diego, my former squadron commander, the very first squadron I reported to, is now a retired banker of Navy Captain as well. But Armistead Burwell Smith, Chick Smith, I met the first time standing on his head at

the O-Club, drinking a martini, a negative one-gravity drink. So what's this zero-g-stuff, you kept telling me of that. By the way, Chick Smith doesn't like that story at all, but it is true that some people can stand on their head and drink. That's negative one-gravity, but once you get fluid in your mouth and then through your whole elementary canal, it just works its way through. So they were afraid of these medical things. How about you? Were you concerned? No. I had done a lot of high altitude work. Actually, I had done some experimental work at around 55, 60,000 feet. And there were no illusions about this being a problem, the suit work, and you could almost start seeing the curvature of the earth, you really couldn't see much of it. I guess the real concept was, is the rocket safe, not the vehicle or the human. We had been through lots of exhausting things, scuba dives, and all kinds of fun things like that. We were water skiers, snow skiers, and of course, hot shot fighter pilots.

So what's this space stuff? Now, in this period, while you were in the middle of Mercury, getting ready for your flight, talked to me about the Russians, did they motivate you? Did you, were you impressed by what they were doing? I guess I was surprised. I mentioned the production of Maryland, and I was there doing a test report on airplane but barely go past Mach 1, an F4D that called, it was called the Skyray, and as I was Alan Chepard, it was called the Skyray, but it just was sure also hard to pronounce. Looking up and seeing the booster that carried Sputnik, going along at Mach 25, which is what you have to have to orbit Earth, and here was Sputnik. And of course, then, Chepard and I kid about this a lot, and I ran missing, obviously, but suddenly, the Russians made us look like we were second-rate, and that hurt. Then we tried to catch up. We had Explorer and Vanguard, Vanguard blew up with great regularity and finally, Explorer went. Then we finally heard the Russians launch the dog, didn't bring it back like it.

We called that Mutnik, and then we were thinking, gosh, we should catch up. We finally got a couple of monkeys up, and then they launched Yuri Gagarin for one orbit around the world. We had nothing. We were still doing chimpanzees flight. We had a chimpanzee flight schedule. We got thousands and thousands of telegrams from the ASPCA about flying monkeys and chimps, so we finally flew Shepard. That's my favorite Shepard story. He got me back, but I didn't do love it. Now moving on to Gemini, Wally. How important was Gemini, do you think? It's kind of forgotten program. So much happened in Gemini, and yet we remember Mercury because you guys were all heroes and on the cover of Life Magazine. Remember Paulo because of the moon. But Gemini seems to be forgotten, and yet it was important. What's your feeling about Gemini? I am very disheartened about the fact that Gemini or Gemini, you can see either. Never got the publicity it should have.

I read a book recently entitled Coralive, and the author, although American was writing with a Soviet, or it was a Soviet slant, Russian slant. They were devastated when we did the things we did in Gemini. When we did the rendezvous, when we did a two-week mission, this blew their minds. They weren't able to do that. What Gemini provided? One was the duration two weeks, which they had with Gemini 7. They did the rendezvous, which we had to have dual lunar mission. They had never done a rendezvous, hadn't done one for years, even after. We had the two-week flat, the rendezvous. We had spacewalk with regularity, not just one that Alexei Leonov did, but a lot of spacewalks. And then we did a precise landing, landed within three or four miles of the aircraft carrier. Of course, I can play in the aircraft carrier with three or four miles out of position. It's typical of all our hot shot types, but we actually did a guided reentry. It wasn't like a ballistic reentry as we did in Mercury. Gemini was an absolute barn burner.

They really did a heck of a lot of stuff. Everything that was done in Gemini had to be done to do a lunar mission. In fact, we even threatened North American, who was kind of slowing down, with the threat that we would take a Gemini around them, and if they weren't going to get there, Apollo ready in time. That was actually a comment made to them. Let's talk about Gemini 6, 6, 7, as some people refer to it. How impressive a test pilot mission was that? You and Stafford up there doing that. Was that a tough assignment? For Kurt, I think I'm fine with that. Hold on, let me recently, please. An interesting thing happened to me recently, I was at Cape Canaveral,

not Kennedy Space Center, and I went through the old blockhouse for Mercury Atlas. There was a picture in there of the seven of us with Mr. Mack of McDonald, and another guy that said unidentified. His name is Walter Burke, the U.R.K.E., Walter and John Yardley, both McDonald employees, senior employees, devised the rendezvous that we had with Gemini 7 for Gemini 6. As we lost our agenda, it blew up before it got into orbit. So we had a recycle of flight. We had problems, of course, when they had a booster that didn't make it on the first lift off, and we got that squared away, and then we finally rendezvoused. The rendezvous was a real task, and why I really look at Gemini as my favorite flight, is that we had to fly it. It was not a computer-controlled vehicle. It was a hot-shot flyboy's vehicle. You had to really get in there and use both hands and pitch and roll and move and translate, and you were flying formation with it. And it was a delight. It was absolutely a perfect vehicle for us to fly. And we used the word fly.

Apollo became another automated vehicle as a shuttle. It's almost automated right down the landing, just before landing the crew take over and land the shuttle. All of them, of course, landed in the early days on a parachute, so that was kind of dull. So I probably would like to land it a shuttle. That's about the only thing I can think of that Gemini didn't have was the capability of landing it. Well, I asked after this question, because John Hubell cut for a second. Is parking a car in your garage in here, right? Parking your car in a garage is interesting.

People describe an aircraft carrier landing at night as driving your car 70 miles an hour with your lights out, trying to get your car in the garage and stop it at the right time. That's a carrier landing at night. A rendezvous is about 25 times faster than all of that. It's Mach 25. The whole thing of rendezvous is exquisite timing, delicate little touches. You don't have time to turn the wheel this way that way. It's all little tiny maneuvers that all compound. I can recall when we...