OT Wally Schirra

Yeah, heard that this AM. Bye, Wally. :(

That's too bad.

Great guy.

Didn't they just shoot Gordo Cooper's remains into space?

Now there's only 2. Glenn and Carpenter. Neither one got to fly Gemini or Apollo, though they did let Glenn fly on the Shuttle.

Wally flew all 3. Gus Grissom was going to get to fly all three, but he perished in that horrid Apollo 1 fire I didn't find out about until a couple years later. (The night of the fire, we were getting record snowfall in Chicago, and were too busy trying to keep the snow from piling up and then the power went out.)

I guess that we've been very fortunate with the space program. If you compare the records of the space program with say, the explorers of the

1500's, we've been fortunate.

Charles of Schaumburg

How could you have missed it? Wasn't it in the newspapers? What about news about the panel that investigated the fire? Didn't that get in the TV news and newspapers? I remember reading about how Richard Feynman demonstrated how the oil rings get hard in freezing temperatures after the Columbia explosion after the disaster as well as the disaster itself. (For the Apollo

1 disaster, my mom was tucking us in around the time of the news, so I missed it, too - at least I have an excuse for not reading about it, because mom was still reading about Cats and Hats and other Dr. Seuss stuff to me; I do remember watching men live on the moon and being amazed that they were all the ways up there in the sky when I was around 4 or 5.)

I remember when the Challenger blew up, too. I was taking a shower. When I got out and returned to the living room, I heard on the radio that the flags were lowered to half-staff at Houston's flight center: I knew immediately that there was one reason considering that I also knew that the space was supposed to fly over Texas, not rain down on it.

The US lost 21 men and women on the ground and in the air (I think 4 were in airplane crashes) as well as several non-astronauts, including some who fell off the equipment. The Russians also lost a number of cosmonauts, as well.

Personally, I would rather my ashes were dumped on a soccer field or in the woods or garbage. After all, it's not like I am going to be alive to care.

Jeff

You've got to understand something. I was 9 at the time, and Congressional Investigations just didn't hit very high on my radar in 1967. I wasn't allowed to use the adult library for another year yet, so even though I was a fan of the space program, I didn't get to follow it as much as I would have liked. It took us several days to dig out of the snow in '67. We were a bit more concerned about local survival, getting to work, digging the cars out, getting groceries for almost a week. By then, the news had dropped off the front page in Chicago and us kids were making up the first snow day my Dad could remember Chicago having.

I do remember exactly where I was when the Challenger disaster happened in

1986. Standing in front of a TV in the Wal-Mart electronics department, watching it take off while I was on my way to lunch. As a new minted Ham, I had become interested in trying to listen to shuttle flights on my TR-2400.

I also remember where I was when the Columbia disaster happened. Sitting in front of the TV watching something when a crawler came across the bottom that they had lost contact with Columbia. I was scratching my head over that bulletin, because I know they lose contact for about 4 minutes because of the ionization and it was due to reenter that morning. Then I flipped to one of the news channels.

As my mom said, Don't bawl and say how much you loved me and send me flowers after I'm gone. I won't care then. I'll be someplace else. She was probably celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary with Dad. It would have been 5 days after she died, and Dad had gone on 4 years before.

Charles of Schaumburg.

I'm quietly waiting for another relic of the 60's to leave the scene.

Hint: He smokes Habana cigars because they make them in his country.

It is appointed for a man once to die, and then the judgement. . . .

At least Wally has things he accomplished for the good. though that really doesn't count at the Last Day.

Charles of Schaumburg

I was working at a job site, and listening to a cap com rebroadcast on the 2m ham radio in the car.. Course, here in Houston, I was listening to the Johnson Space Center repeater... Heard the whole thing... I knew once they said the vehicle had exploded, they were in deep doo-doo.. Since then, I always perk my ears up on a flight when they go for "throttle up" at that phase of the launch. "104% I believe" I was old enough to remember all the 60's stuff. In fact, I remember the mercury program pretty well from the early 60's. I was born in 56... I still remember when Ike was president.. One of my earliest TV memories... I'll never forget that bald head, and big ears on the old

1950's admiral box I used to camp in front of. But in those early days, Capt Kangaroo was probably my favored programming. MK

When I first heard news of Challenger having problems, I thought that it had to do a one-orbit abort or a transoceanic abort and landed normally. It never entered my mind that the spacecraft had actually exploded because I thought it was so reliable that such a disaster had virtually no chance of happening.

I guess Wally Schirra was right after all about the space shuttle being dangerous junk.

I was working at the NASA Tracking Station Corpus Christi TX when the fire occurred. Being young at the time it really hit me hard.

btw we were NOT ready to track Apollo 1. Busy times. Fun times. Sad times.

While I don't think that the space station was worth the cost, and certainly the program to return to the moon and go to Mars is worth the cost, I don't think the space program was junk. After all, it started with left-over WWII rockets from Germany.

Jeff

I was very young then too, and didn't find out about the launch pad fire until years later, as well.

I was in AIT at Ft. Gordon, GA and our formation had just marched back to the barracks at lunch time. For some reason I went into the barracks instead of going straight over to the dining facility. I saw a lot of people in the dayroom in front of the TV and went in to see what was going on. I remember Dan Rather's voice and multiple replays of the explosion.

I learned about Columbia on the internet after getting home from the night shift at Sony.

You're a bit older than I. I won't cross the half century mark until later this year. I do not remember Ike at all. The first real TV event I remember is the JFK funeral. I had my tonsils out the same day he was shot. So when I was puking from coming out of the ether in the recovery room, the nurses were all standing around the radio in a state of shock because it was about 1:30 CST in the afternoon. I was so PISSED that there was no TV to watch for 4 days while I had to sit at home and eat ice cream.

I once considered that while I was under the ether, I got transported into an alternate universe where that Texan was President, instead of that east-coast liberal philanderer. Looking back at JFK, it's amazing how conservative he was. No wonder the Left wanted him out of the way.

Charles of Schaumburg

Charles of Schaumburg

So if the "Apollo 1" mission had gone off as scheduled on Feb 21, 1967, a lot of othe pieces wouldn't have worked either?

I guess it could have been worse. They could have been in space when the fire happened.

Charles of Schaumburg.

Oh we would have tracked. We always did....we just were not as ready as we should have been.

The transition between Gemeni and Apollo was quite significant.

How would that have been worse?

Jeff

Yes, we took a year and a half break between Mercury and Gemini, and we were attempting to push into Apollo with NO break at all. Gemini 12 had completed the month before. Go fever, as Eugene Kranz put it, was everywhere.

But one of the things I miss about that time is that we were TRYING to GO somewhere. Now we're standing around going nowhere and the Liberals want us to stand there with a certain part of our anatomy in our hand, as it were. . . . as if playing with ourselves were a substitute for real accomplishments.

Charles of Schaumburg

We probably wouldn't have got the bodies back, since we couldn't have recovered the spacecraft. Remember a lot of the wiring burned up. I don't know if they could have hit the button on the control panel fast enough to stop the fire, but if they weren't in their pressure suits, they would have died, too.

There would probably be Apollo 1 orbiting for years until its orbit decayed and it plunged back into the atmosphere and burned up on reentry. (No control means it doesn't get to use that big heat shield to protect it, either.)

Charles of Schaumburg.

In other words, they would have been just as dead.

Jeff

But we would have an orbiting reminder every day for YEARS of the failure. At least with it on the ground, we could bury the dead, fix the problem and get on with it, which is what we needed to do. That's also what we need to do in Iraq and Iran. Bury the dead, FIX the problem and get on with it. A Vietnam-style cowering home isn't going to FIX the problem. As long as we don't FIX the problem, we're going to have to deal with those Sand Pounders. I like Scott's idea best. America needs a new glass factory.

Charles of Schaumburg