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

Go fever, what's the common in the test pilot business? Go fever I can recall very vividly, long before it was a test pilot, it was flying an F8F beric at a propeller airplane, off an aircraft carrier, ready to leave this carrier, been in the Mediterranean for about five or six months, we're going to fly to the beach, we had smuggled some champagne on board the ship and put it in the compartments, hid it away from everybody, very illegal to have anything aboard ship to drink, we put the champagne in our ammo boxes and we were waiting to take off when you, when you have a propeller airplane, you have the throttle up and you check the mags and you do a mag check, like that's in case it's something wrong, you don't want it to happen, that's go fever, you want to get off the ship, we got off the ship, got up into about, oh maybe 8,000 feet and they said you have to climb higher above the clouds, I could see those champagne bottles, pop, pop, pop out and they did the all blue, so I know what the cause of go fever, or the result of go fever is, now it's an old expression among people who take risk, it means you want to go no

matter what, and I could recall one time I was on a film shoot for CBS in the Smithsonian on the Colorado River and this guy's flying us in this puddle jumper, a little tiny airplane, he does a mag check, do it slowly please, in one mag drop, let's go back, we'll get the mag checked, I didn't have go fever at that time, but okay, so 7, did you feel, did you feel God, this is you know after the Apollo fire, first flight up, were you feeling the responsibility of making this thing go, of making the program go, I mean the country was thinking why are we doing this? The load was on my back, as I finally saw it, now I'm a force stripper, Navy captain, and this is a command, and NASA did understand it, in my mind I was on loan to NASA, I didn't work for NASA, I worked with NASA, and I made it quite clear during that mission, if you're giving me this mission after having lost three friends, and asking me to take this thing up, I'm going to make it go right, when

we took that command module to the Cape to be checked, I said this thing has been checked out, everything is done, don't mess it up, this is the same jelly wally, no I'm not, I'm serious about this, and I also felt the responsibility of protecting two rookies who'd never been in space before, and letting them know that they could rely on my judgment, if I didn't like it it meant it wasn't good, and that I'd been there twice before, and this is the kind of experience that they were looking forward to having tell them how to go, and it worked that way, so I got a little tougher, there were times I could play also, did you feel that there was just no, when you got up and we're in space, obviously there was tension with the ground at times, what was that tension about? The tension initially started by breaking a mission rule, we had a couch in the block one spacecraft that was transferred to the block two for ours only, and it was not capable of taking a land landing, if we had to board off the launch pad we'd have a land landing,

to avoid that we had a wind vector that would be outlawed, a mission rule, if the wind was from this direction at this strength we would not launch, the wind was from that direction at greater than that strength, and they launched us, and I was furious because I talked about that at great length, but look we can wait, there's no, we're not trying to rendezvous with somebody, we're not trying to go to the moon this way, we're just going to bore holes for 11 days, if it's a problem, wait an hour, wait a day, wait two days, let's not break all the mission rules from the very beginning, they broke it, so from then I said okay you can make any rule changes, you're going to hear from me, and they made a few changes during the mission, and the funny thing is I got credit for the line, I wish I had said it, they sent up a command which locked our computer up, it actually got locked like tilt, and I actually said what idiot sent that command up, I got credit for the line, I wish I had thought of saying it, because some idiot made a check, in fact we talked about the inertial guidance system, they wanted us to check a planner, I think it was probably Mercury, going through the horizon at Mercury set, like Earth set sunset, and when you do

this like dividing one by zero and the computer locked up, we had seen that before at MIT, we try to look across the Charles River at the nurse's quarters really, as you swing it up, the computer locked up, this technician said if ever happens to you, hit clear and add the same time, and it'll come back on, so it was locked up, now where the problem comes from, if the computer is locked up, we could not have done a Apollo 8, we needed the computer to grow the moon in back, if it was a fault in the computer, we needed to know that, so as we disappeared, as we say over the horizon, as we went from tracking station to tracking station in those days, done, I said you know that seems like the same time we're looking at the nurse's square, let's try the clear and add camera back on the line, we got to the next station, and Houston saw the computer working, how did you fix that? I said you guys find out, they had to call that technician at MIT finally and find out how we did it, but that kind of, you don't play games with something like that, because

we saw the guidance system not available for a reentry from the moon, we needed that for our own reentry from Earth orbit. Hey Bill, do you think you can ask the folks coming in to be quiet for another 15 minutes? Okay, that would really help, like Whistling and Talking Loud, that's going to hurt us right now. Thanks Bill. What was the next thing that you guys resisted up there? Well, we launched, of course, didn't have the wind as a problem, and we got into orbit, and everything was working perfectly.

And shortly after we were in orbit, we were doing all our tasks, making burns and doing a rendezvous with the upper stage and taking photographs of it. We finally got some sleep time, and we arranged that we would have one guy on watch, Don Isaac was on watch, cunning him and I were sleeping. I heard Don say something about it while he's not going to like this, and I woke up immediately. What am I not going to like? Of course, I had my headset on, I could hear it. They wanted television that next morning, and I said, that's not in the schedule. They're all happy with the fact that the mission's going well, we're finally back in space again after having lost the three-minute launch pad, so they're getting excited about getting some publicity. They're going to put a television show on, and I said, we're not scared to do that until the next day. We had to check this out. This is an electronic device that could have a short, we don't know, we want to check it out very methodically, we're not going to just turn it on and say, click here as your television. This is part of the drill. We've trained to do this, this is not on our agenda, don't change the schedule, but we needy need it. Guess what?

You guys don't know how to turn it on, and the subject, while he didn't like it. We turned it on the next day, and of course we got an Emmy for it. We had the Wally Walton Don show, we had a lot of fun. By then we had our confidence up. We tested everything, we could float around, we slept very soundly, we were over that initial tension of whether we were going to live through launch, get into orbit safely, whether the vehicle would perform properly, it did all those things, and we were back up to a, I might add, when you get in, we took off with the amount of to a sea level atmosphere, that was one of our safety precautions. They were talking about having a shave off all our hair. I said, it's going to grow back in a few days, don't do that, okay, we won't do that. We had nothing to read, all the things that we had to read, like check this, we printed on non-burning paper, so we were pretty damn aware of board, so we were looking forward to doing a TV show, ultimately, and that was why we were so reluctant to change the flight plan. Did you feel that there were cram in too much science onto that flight? Before we took off, there was a request to put a lot of science on there, I said, look, we're trying to get a transportation system to go with the moon and back, let's worry

about the science later. And that was true of most of the commission commanders, they said, we'll do some science for you, once we land on the moon, but leave the science out of there until we do the task. We had lots of time for science, we thought we'd gone for a long time with a project to follow. We were looking for a long-term program, I think it was over 20 flights scheduled. Of course, they dumped all of those later on. Did you take me back to when the scientists started to first come in, like the geologists in the stuff? I know there were a lot of the astronauts. What was the reaction to the geologists by then? I'm trying to think of the geologists that like so much as the asteroid and the meteoroid that hit Schumacher. Schumacher. Schumacher. Schumacher. It was one of those wonderful guys, we went up to the media creator in Arizona, and there's a picture of us crawling along the ground like we're on our hands and knees, it's one of my favorite photographs with a bunch of us, and it was Schumacher, what are they doing that for?

They're close to Earth here, he said, I give up, but he became a good friend, of course, we lost him not too long ago in Australia, in order to be able to crash. The gene was here in San Diego, and he and his wife gave a talk, introduced him, and probably one of the dullest talks they ever heard of my life, but what's so funny about these geologists? I came home with rock samples to be prepared to go to the moon and examine the moon. So much matured that I bring home, my son went to Stanford and became a geologist. 100 aviator geologist, that's kind of a funny line. When he was done as a graduate geologist, he said, Dad, you know, you had more field trips than I did, more courses than I did. I got a degree, you did, that's how far we went with it, but everything we did, we did that thoroughly. Among the, you old test pilots though, you know, how did you feel about what, what cutting him called the hyphenated astronauts? The so-called scientist astronaut, well it's always been jealous of that because he's done a test pilot, and well, cutting him, of course. The interesting thing about the hyphenated astronaut is that we had that much training

to become part scientist. I feel sad that some of the guys were jealous, Buzz Alden was terribly jealous about the fact he wasn't a test pilot graduate, and he made a big point out of that, but the sad part of it is that we were being trained as much as we could afford to be trained in science as well as flying the spacecraft, and we had more time left, we spent more time on science. Initially, on the first flight, I was scheduled for Nepal, when I was going to fly the second flight on block one, I rejected the sciences, we're trying to go to the moon and back, not trying to do a science program about what the bodies like in space, how fast you can pedal to bicycling space, what are the effects of zero G, we can do that later with the space station. Right now.