Customer Reviews

Schirra's Space (Bluejacket Books)

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4 star:		(6)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

As much as I was a fan of Wally Schirra during his days in the space program, or perhaps because of that, I was mildly disappointed in his autobiography. This work strikes me as typical of a number of astronaut biographies and autobiographies rushed into print over the past generation or so, rather unremarkable in literary style and adding little to the historiography of this critical era of space travel.

Perhaps this should not be surprising. The author identifies himself as a technical man who throughout his military career kept his nose to the grind of precision flying and admits to little connectedness to the culture outside. No one should take up this work and expect to find Astronaut Schirra's opinion of "My Fair Lady." To the day of its publication the author through his book exudes continued pride in his association with other pilots of exceptional competence, and conversely, an avoidance of those who in his view are or were more form than substance. [Chuck Yeager, for example, will probably never grace the Schirra Thanksgiving table.] If Schirra is infected with hubris, it comes honorably.

Schirra is the antithesis of the joker and clown he was sometimes depicted as in, say, "The Right Stuff." It is within the world of test flying and space exploration that the reader will best connect with Schirra: learning, for example, that Schirra had little use for the extensive battery of medical tests to which all the early astronaut candidates were subjected. He was highly critical of the early conceptualization of Project Mercury. He was among those who considered early spaceflight "Spam in a Can" and lobbied extensively for pilot control in all of the various programs in which he served. His blunt talk, however, made sense as events would prove.

One can probably argue with credibility that Schirra was one of the half-dozen most competent pilots of the entire Mercury-Apollo era. His Sigma 7 flight in October, 1962, was a quantum leap for Mercury in terms of both distance and fuel economy. But his greatest contribution to the space program may have come in December, 1965, when in a four day period the author not only averted a major space catastrophe but achieved a technical breakthrough of major importance for reaching the moon.

Gemini 6 was a star-crossed flight from opening day. Scheduled for October, 1965, its mission objective was rendezvous with an unmanned Agena rocket launched hours earlier. The Agena inexplicably blew up before Schirra's and Tom Stafford's craft was launched, and the mission went into temporary limbo. However, after much discussion about feasibility, Gemini 6 was rescheduled for a December launch, with its new rendezvous target being nothing less than Gemini 7, the 14-day endurance epic of Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.

Gemini 7 was launched successfully early in December, and after a mere nine day turnaround of the Gemini launch pad--itself a record of sorts--the author and Stafford were ready to launch Gemini 6 in pursuit of Borman and Lovell. But in what has to be one of the more hair-raising moments of the space program, Gemini 6's launch rocket shut down a millisecond before lifting off the ground. The various disastrous scenarios were as numerous as the imagination permitted. In his own printed words Schirra is quite matter of fact about this dilemma and his now-famous choice against capsule ejection--which, incidentally, saved the rendezvous mission itself, as matters would transpire. For the historical record, Schirra sees his decision as the vindication of human pilots over computer guidance, and he seems proudest of this maneuver and the mission that followed.

He is right to be proud. If Schirra's instincts served him well atop Gemini 6 on the ground, his piloting skills three days later would set the space program ahead by leaps and bounds. Gemini 6 found its target in minimum time and milked the maximum possible navigational experience from the rendezvous. Gemini 6 established that with a skilled pilot a space vehicle could pretty much go wherever needed, an indispensable technical advance for moon landing technology.

Gemini 6 may have been Schirra's finest hour in the space program. It would be different after that. The fiery death of his old Mercury sidekick Gus Grissom in 1967 left Schirra as the only active member of the original seven astronauts and raised doubts in his mind about the Apollo Program in general. Apollo was exponentially more complicated than the Mercury Program for which he was chosen. Schirra has plenty to say about Apollo management, but there is a hint in his reflections that the Mercury crew [which included, at least hypothetically, Cooper, Slayton, Shepard and himself] might have been "over the hill" when Apollo took center stage. [182]

Schirra's comportment before and during Apollo 7, the first of the Apollo manned flights, has been the subject of considerable conjecture. This reader's impression is that Schirra had reservations about the vehicle, but more so with the management team behind it. The author complains that he was misled about guidelines for acceptable launch time wind velocities, and once in flight, pressured to perform tasks that interfered with basic shake-down procedures. The author's head cold while in space would later take on humorous proportions in his award winning Actifed TV commercials, but at the time his general health and its impact upon flight procedure became major ground to space confrontations. But in rare candor for an astronaut, Schirra admitted the unthinkable--Apollo 7 was boring him out of his mind by mid-flight. [203]

Schirra had announced his retirement before Apollo 7, and if Deke Slayton is to be believed, the author would never again have to worry about space boredom, as his crewmates Eisele and Cunningham ruefully discovered. The happy ending to this tale is Schirra's personal pride and contentment at his career's body of work and the ongoing respect he enjoyed from the top professionals in his field at the time of his book`s publication in 1988.

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I long have been a huge fan of Wally Schirra. I have always adored his keen sense of humor and wit. Furthermore, his impeccable aviator and astronaut careers always made me feel awe struck. Therefore, I greatly looked forward to reading Mr. Schirra's account of his career. My main interest was to get a real insiders look into the space program - which I believe the book did successfully on some major points. Mr. Schirra's wit pleasantly shined throughout the book - this made the reading more pallatable. Regretfully, the reason for my three star rating is the fact that the book would ramble. Without a moments notice, it would jump ahead in time and backward in time. I found this fact to be very irritating as I tried to stay focused and gain as much information as I could from my reading. I thought that maybe I was being too critical, but this sore spot was evident throughout the book. By the time that I had finished the book, I felt exaspirated from the time warps. Do not get me wrong, Mr. Wally Schirra is still a brilliant man in my eyes - I just found that the book was not a good representation of the the true great man that he is. All in all, for the average reader, I feel that this book has many good bits of information - as long as you are willing to sift through the minutia of time jumps.

After Schirra's return from Apollo 7 Deke Slayton met him on the recovery ship for a private talk. Since Wally planed to retire Slayton saw nothing wrong with him trashing his own reputation with Mission Control. But how, Deke asked, could Wally have done that to his crewmates? Deke would have liked to have assigned Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele to future missions but felt he could not do so because he felt Chris Kraft's people would have been unwilling to work with them.

We don't get the answer to this question. We do however read about condoms the size of trash bags, a urine sample so large it requires a five gallon jug and drag racing on public streets in full view of police officers. You or I would have been busted but the cops just laugh and let Wally get away with it because hay he's Wally Schirra.

I'm reminded of Bart Simpson's statement about Krusty the Clown's autobiography, "Self serving with many glaring omissions". And yet Bart continues to love Krusty just as I continue to love Schirra. I guess we all need our heroes and a watered down autobiography is better than none at all.

I didn't think this was a bad book. It just wasn't very in depth. Captain Schirra lightly hits on the areas that most readers would be most interested in . I would reccommend this book to those interested in the early space programs but only after you read such books as "Moonshot" by Alan Sheppard and Deke Slayton, et al. I know that test pilots, fighter pilots, and astronauts have to have a big enough ego to handle all the challenges they face, but sometimes Capt Schirra's ego gets in the way while reading "Schirra's Space".

Wally Schirra, perhaps more than all the other "Original Seven"
Mercury astronauts, embodies all the great strengths along
with the weaknesses of this group compared with the astronauts
who entered the space program after them.
It must be remembered that when the original astronauts were
chosen in 1959, manned spaceflight was a great unknown. In particular,
it was not known how the human body would responds to all the stresses
caused by the massive accelerations and decelerations of the spacecraft
in addition to the problems of prolonged "weightlessness". Thus,
those astronauts chosen were found to be able to withstand worst-case
scenarios for these things. Piloting skills were not as important
because the astronaut didn't really have much control of the Mercury
spacecraft.
By the time Schirra flew on his Sigma 7 flight (the fifth of the series), it had been found that the psychological and physiological stresses were not that great. In addition, the flight before his, Aurora 7, by Scott Carpenter was a near disaster because he did a poor job doing what little
piloting he could. Thus Schirra was called on to show that, indeed, with
good piloting skills, precise maneuvers could be carried out. Using what
Schirra called "the light stuff", Schirra proved that a skilled pilot can
do what has to be done while conserving precious fuel.
By the time the much more advanced two-man Gemini spacecraft came to fly, it was now necessary to carry out far more sophisticated missions, involving rendezvous, docking and EVA. Schirra in his Gemini 6 mission, along with Tom Stafford, spectacularly carried out the first rendezvous when his spacecraft met up with the already orbiting Gemini 7. Schirra was the perfect choice because he showed that the "light stuff" can
allow complicated space operations of the type needed to land on the Moon using the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mode within the fuel constraints that were available. He also saved his Gemini mission when the Titan II booster rocket's engines cut off seconds after ignition and Schirra's
outstanding "feel" as a pilot told him NOT to carry out a very dangerous
ejection, so the mission was saved to fly another day.
Gemini training using simulations was far more complicated than those for Mercury and the veteran Mercury astronauts who flew Gemini like Schirra and Gordon Cooper found them more exhausting.
After the Apollo 1 fire, Schirra was once again called in to save the manned spaceprogram and was assigned the first Apollo flight. By this time, as he put it in his own words, he was being "devoured" by the space program. Fellow crewman Walt Cunningham felt that Schirra really didn't want to fly the mission but he pushed himself to do it out of a feeling of responsibility to his friend and fellow Mercury astronaut Gus Grisson who perished in the fire. This flight (called Apollo 7) not only would break in a new spacecraft that was far more sophisticated than the already complex Gemini spacecraft. Whenever flying a new spacecraft, there are always uncertainties as to whether all the bugs have shaken out, and in addition, the simulation training was even more time consuming and exhausting. All these things took their toll on Schirra, and the pressures came bursting out of him during the flight when he became ill with a head cold. Schirra began berating the flight controllers which enraged Chris Kraft, the head of flight operations.
Also, even though the mission was scheduled to last 11 days in order to
test the ability to last the duration of a lunar landing flight, Schirra
adamantly opposed carrying out more than a minimal number of scientific experiments. This was another legacy of the Mercury astronauts who loved flying but generally had little interest in the scientific aspects of space exploration. Thus, Walt Cunningham felt that the mission, although proving the spacecraft
was spaceworthy, wasted a lot of time that could have been used to
carry out more experiments and which would have alleviated their boredom
on the last days of the mission. Schirra even objected to carrying at TV camera on board, but NASA management insisted, saying the taxpayers had the right to see what their billions of dollars were going for. In this matter, Schirra relented.
Fortunately, as the moon landings approached, NASA began to choose astronauts who weren't as "tough" as the Original Seven, but they were better educated scientifically and technically, and they were better able to handle and understand the complex systems that made up the Apollo spacecraft, and they had more of a willingness to study geology and other scientific disciplines which Apollo's space exploration capabilites would enable space and planetary scientists to exploit.
Like all the other astronaut autobiographies, with the notable exception
of Mike Collins' "Carrying the Fire", this one does not really describe
what spaceflight is really like, nor will the reader will not really learn much more about America's space program by reading this book.
However, American owes Wally Schirra a lot. He stepped in twice when the
space program was in crisis and his exceptional piloting skills (maybe the best of the Original Seven) put America on its path to the Moon.

Not even factually correct in some cases.. as when Wally implies that he got the LLTV training cancelled because it was dangerous. Wrong !!! It was used through Apollo 17. I own over a hundred aviation and space books, but this one I gave to Good Will after I read it.

When I have seen interviews with Wally Schirra, I have found him to be the most candid and most comical of the original astronauts involved in the U.S. moon landing program in the 60's. I have tried to find his book for some time and found it on Amazon.com. But the anticipation of reading this book far exceeded the actual event. Mr. Schirra gives a rambling dissertation on his role in the program, many times suddenly shifting topics in mid-paragraph and telling stories out of sequence (like describing the landing before he discusses the launch). Plus he doesn't go into much detail about some of the more interesting things in his NASA career (such as the mutiny he was involved in with the NASA flight directors during Apollo 7). It just seems like Mr. Schirra spoke random thoughts into a tape recorder and the results were typed and published verbatim without much editing. A less than average effort; probably the worst book written by an astronaut about the moon program.

Schirra's Space was an interesting, quick and very enlightening read. I knew there was a good reason for Wally to retire from NASA early, but I didn't hear much about it prior to reading this book. This book tells that story and also permitted Wally to give us his thoughts about the manned space program. One of his biggest gripes at retirement was that NASA had no immediate plans for lofting a manned space station. That gripe is no longer valid.

Wally provided much info and also described in some detail the step by step sequence he used to achieve orbital rendezvous between Gemini 7 and 6 (sufficient to simulate the celestial event on the computer).

I had not heard that NASA considered hard docking the two Gemini spacecraft, but that it was ultimately voted down as too risky by the pilots and other experts who had a vote. Although many of his comments are no longer valid this was an interesting book. The writing appeared to be straight "Wally talk" with little editing for style, telling the reader exactly what Wally thoughts were quickly and efficiently.

One interesting observation made by Wally was that the Gemini handled more like a fighter than the relatively massive Apollo, which felt more like a bomber or truck. Clearly he enjoyed his Gemini mission most of his three.

Wally Shirra doesn't lack for confidence. Then again how would a person, without the self confidence of a test pilot, strap himself to a rocket? A great insider's view of the program. However for all his confidence Shirra goes out of his way to not cast a single stone at the many people he crossed paths with through out his career. A class act. No new real information is uncovered through this book. Just a fun read.

Thankfully, Wally Schirra has taken the time to pen his memoirs. Though the book is quite short, it gives the reader all the information that one would like or need to know about Mercury-Sigma 7, Gemini 6 and Apollo 7. Mr. Schirra was part of the elite "Original 7" fraternity which makes his story important for history. Wally cuts to the chase and tells it like it was. While the book will not win the Pulitzer Prize, Wally quickly sums up his youth, his entry into the Navy and his eventual rise to astronaut. I especially appreciated Wally's coverage of Apollo 7 which seems to be lost in the history books. In most books on Apollo, the Apollo 7 flight is given nothing more than glancing coverage. Apollo 7 was very important, because if Apollo 7 did not succeed, Apollo 8 would have been a moot point. The reader gains an understanding of why Wally left NASA after Apollo 7, when it seems clear that had he remained around, he could have gone to the moon. It is nice to see that someone in that position thought of family above job. This book is a must for anyone who wants to supplement their knowledge of the early space program. Any space enthusiast knows that to gain a full understanding of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, you need to read as many astronaut autobiographies as one can get their hands on. Each astronaut who has written their story adds something that has not been mentioned before. Mr. Schirra has written a great book. The writing style may not be the best, but this book is a quick read that can be read in one day. The reader will come away from this book understanding and appreciating the unique contributions as well as the wit, charm and humor of Wally Schirra. Good job Wally!