From: mark@xfbdev.megatek.com (Mark Thompson)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: W. Schirra interview, copied
Date: 13 Oct 92 20:05:31 GMT
Organization: Megatek Corporation, San Diego, California

Rhymes With Hurrah
by Claudia Pearce

If the Right Stuff can be inherited, Walter M. Schirra must have got
his from his parents, who were daredevils in a flying show (dad flew
the biplane, mom walked the wings). Schirra's mother liked to say she
stopped wing-walking when Wally was "in the hangar."

Schirra started flying at 13, soloed at 16 and flew over 90 missions
in the Korean War as a Navy fighter pilot. After being selected as one
of the original seven NASA astronauts, he orbited the earth in Mercury
8 in 1962, commanded the first space rendezvous in Gemini 6 in 1965
and commanded the Apollo 7's test run for the moon shot in 1968. He
retired from the space program in 1969 to spend more time with his
family. Since then he's made a comfortable living with public
appearances, speeches and commercials.

We interviewed Schirra in the study of his spacious Rancho Santa Fe
home. As we talked, he pointed out various mementos -- a wildebeest
head, a zebra-skin rug, and other game trophies from his worldwide
hunting trips; autographed pictures from his astronaut days -- with
President Kennedy, with President Johnson, with other astronauts; a
large-screen TV for watching "NASA select," NASA's own private channel
that he receives from a backyard satellite dish; and model rockets,
space ships, and jets.

Over the study door is a placard reading "It's good to have money, it
keeps the kids calling." Apparently, Schirra hasn't passed on his
flying genes to his children: His son deals in coins and antique
furniture in San Francisco and his daughter runs an art gallery in
Vail, Colorado.

Claudia Pearce: How did you feel your first time in space? Were you
scared, claustrophobic?

Wally Schirra: Well, no, I wasn't. We trained out fear. I like to say
we subjugated fear to apprehension. They simulated everything that
could possibly happen. We did our very best to avoid any kind of
surprise, to control the unknown.

CP: What about the surprise you had on your second mission -- Gemini?
When the rockets were ignited you came very close to being blown up.

WS: The preflight simulation didn't have that one. I knew what liftoff
felt like, and I knew we hadn't lifted off. All this went through my
brain in a split second. If we had lifted off -- even an inch or so --
and then settled back down, and I hadn't ejected, we'd have been
incinerated. But I intuitively knew we hadn't lifted off, so I was
able to make the decision not to eject, which would have ruined the
space ship.

CP: There's always the possibility that something will go really
wrong, like the Apollo fire, in which three astronauts died.

WS: Yeah, we were in there the night before them, doing the same test
they did, but ours was a walk-through with regular air. They were in a
dress rehearsal in a pure-oxygen environment. We think an electric
spark caused the explosion. They knew there were some electrical
problems, but kept going. They had warnings that would have been
enough to justify them getting out of there, but they didn't. That's
when I gave up smoking.

CP: What about the Challenger disaster?

WS: That was kind of predictable. We've been surprised that of the
original seven astronauts, six of us are still alive today. [Virgil
Grissom died in the Apollo fire.] The Challenger accident proved that
we had gone too far by calling the shuttle a "Space Transportation
System." Well, it's not. You don't want senators or congressmen or
schoolteachers in this tough environment. Most of us in the test-pilot
business say it's still a test article, it's not a transportation
system.

CP: Do you think NASA is more cautious as a result?

WS: They're always worried about another accident. If another shuttle
accident occurred, I imagine it would be the death knell for the space
station. They're already fighting like mad to get Congress to approve
financing for it.

CP: How important is the space station?

WS: That's where we're going to learn more about the physiology of men
and women in space. We also need the space station to launch missions.
It's much easier to get out once you leave earth's atmosphere.
To get to Mars with the power plants we have today, it's about a
three-year trip, counting some stay-time on Mars to justify the cost
of the trip. That long a period of time in weightlessness is something
we don't know how to handle. And we don't know how to handle a person
bottled up that long in an isolated environment. They're a three-year
bubble baby. And they come back to earth and they've been in a pure
environment for three years and are wide open to all the latest
viruses. They'll have to go through a slow withdrawal. We don't know
any of these things yet, and a space station would give us that kind
of information.

CP: Do you feel there is a "leadership vacuum" in space exploration?
WS: Even though I'm an avowed Republican, I have to say that Quayle
really messed up. The Vice President is in charge of the national
space counsel. Johnson did a great job of it. I didn't admire him, but
I did respect him.
Well, Quayle's got these far-out ideas that we must start working on
going to the moon and to Mars and they just aren't practical. The
country can by no means afford the trip to Mars at this time. That's
really amateurish political thinking in my mind. And because Richard
Truly [until March, 1992, NASA's top administrator] was not a fan of
Quayle's views, he fired him.
Quayle had a reception for all the astronauts and the people from the
new Star Trek television series. All of us were there, and his wife
was playing tennis in Florida. She didn't bother to show up. The whole
thing gave me a funny feeling.
I talked to John Glenn a couple of days ago and I told him, "It's a
damn shame George Bush wasn't picked up by a PBY instead of a
submarine in the war."
Now the Navy is run by sub people instead of aviators. If they'd been
good leaders they could have snuffed that Tailhook thing in no time.
They could have punished the offenders long before Peppermint Patty
(that what we call Pat Schroeder) got wind of it.

CP: Is there public support for the Mars mission?

WS: What the manned program did was prove that the public will support
humans in the pioneering mode. They could care less about some
unmanned vehicle. The quest is there, just like the men and women who
had the urge to go across country in a covered wagon. But in those
days, they struggled along with their own team of oxen and their own
supplies. They didn't have to depend upon the government to help them.
Now we're asking all the taxpayers to pay, and it's a big difference.
We can't go on doing these "gee whiz" things.

CP: What about the race to the moon? Wasn't that a "gee whiz" thing?

WS: I think the moon trip was valid at the time. The country was very
despondent about Viet Nam and discouraged about being second in
technology, which it turned out we weren't. We needed something to get
excited about besides this degrading Vietnamese thing. So it was
perfect timing.

CP: What do you think about "Mission to Planet Earth," the concept
Sally Ride promoted in her "Ride Report?"

WS: That's my favorite. ALl the "ologists" are excited about what they
see from earth's orbit. Roger Revelle, the guru of oceanography, told
me satellite data indicated conclusively that underwater storms are
moving 20 to 25 miles an hour. That's very, very fast. That means you
can disperse all kinds of things. That means if we can get our offshore
sewage pipe in San DIego another mile out to that storm area, we could
really whip that stuff all over the ocean in a hurry and "skaboot" it
down to nothing. That's one example [of how space technology can help
us understand earth].
And now we're getting global positioning from satellites. WIth global
positioning you can get your altitude, latitude and longitude within
about 50 feet. I was amazed. It's a waterproof 3-by-8-inch box that
uses six double-A batteries that takes readings from the satellites to
tell exactly where you are. I have one in my boat. So "Mission to
Planet Earth" helps in many ways. The satellites can look at rain
forests, water currents, volcanoes.

CP: Have we got enough satellites to do the job?

WS: No, we need more equipment, a lot of it unmanned. And we can store
the data in the platoons of computers that the National Security
Agency has stuffed with useless stuff about the Soviet Union that
didn't do us a damn bit of good. We can fill them with data from
planet earth.

CP: Humans have made a mess of much of earth. Are you worried about us
doing the same to space?

WS: No, space is our ally. We can look at earth and document it
carefully.

CP: So you don't think that we'll much up space like we have the
earth?

WS: Oh no, I think we have more sense than that, although we did want
to leave a seashell on the moon.

CP: What about the debris we've left floating around?

WS: Well space is so big compared to earth...

CP: We thought that about North America and the ocean at one time.

WS: Yeah, that's true. And we have some penalties. But if the stuff is
in lower orbit it will eventually fall down and burn up in the
atmosphere.

CP: Did you or any of your fellow astronauts have an especially
meaningful, metaphysical experience in space?

WS: A couple have, Jim Irwin had a thing called "high flight," which
was a born-again Christian type of thing on the moon. I'd tease him
about it. It's an odd place for that to happen.
And Ed Mitchell was into ESP. He carried cards on his flight to see if
ESP was enhanced in flight, but I think it came out normal. And then
he made a career out of it afterwards.

CP: When you were in space, were you able to enjoy the experience, or
were you too busy?

WS: Finally on Apollo we had a lot of quiet time. I wore this calendar
watch band. And the band has the days of October, 1968, scratched off
like the days of a prisoner in jail. There was a lot of time to look
around during that flight. And it eventually got boring. Especially
since the window was so thick, the light diffracted and you couldn't
see the stars much better than you could on earth. But even though you
were watching it go by at five miles a second, the view of earth was
unreal. 
-- 
--- 
Rocket J. Squirrel			{uunet,ucsd,sun}!megatek!mark
	"Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a Rabbit out of my hat!"
		"Again!? But that trick never works!"