“Hero” is a word that’s lost much of its meaning in recent years due to overuse and misuse. All too often, in my not-so-humble opinion, it’s a label that gets applied to people who don’t deserve it. The general public tends to confuse heroism with mere celebrity, while those who would influence the public aren’t above trying to create artificial heroes when it suits their purposes or advances a cause.
But there are still genuine heroes in the world, even if we sometimes have to look backwards to see them. One of them died this week: Wally Schirra, age 84, of natural causes. Not a very heroic death, that, but everyone dies and most people do it in rather mundane fashions. What matters is what you do while you’re alive. And he did some amazing things.
Wally Schirra was an astronaut back when the job description meant you were willing to be bolted into a cramped, pressurized cannister and fired into space atop a missile that had originally been designed to deliver terrible weapons to a target halfway around the world. Back when scientists weren’t even sure if a person would be able to swallow in zero-g, or if weightlessness would derange your sense of equilibrium to the point where you were unable to function. (I’ve been in that state before, thanks to a nasty ear infection; I think if weightlessness had made the early astronauts the same way I felt, we would’ve never gotten them back. They would’ve willingly burned up with their capsules, just to make the universe stop spinning.) It took a lot of guts for the seven astronauts of the Mercury spaceflight program to do what they did; they were trailblazers that were literally doing things no one else had ever done.
It’s kind of ironic, for someone who considers himself such a space buff, that I first became aware of Wally when he appeared in a series of TV ads for a new decongestant — Sudafed, I think it was. It was an appropriate thing for him to endorse, considering that he suffered from a cold during one of his spaceflights. Apparently, having a cold in zero gravity is a unique and horrible form of misery.
His real accomplishments in space were far more impressive, though. As the pilot of a Mercury capsule in 1962, Schirra became the third American to orbit the Earth; he circled the planet six times and was up in the black for more than nine hours, back in a time when we were still counting such things and trying to make the numbers go higher with every flight.
As the commander of the two-man Gemini 6 in 1965, he proved that two spacecraft could safely rendezvous in orbit by steering to within mere feet of a sister ship, Gemini 7, as they coasted along some 185 miles above the surface of Earth.
And he commanded Apollo 7, the first manned flight of one of the ships that would carry human beings to the Moon.
Despite having gone into space three times, he never grew blase’ about the dangers of what he was doing.. In 1981, as Crippen and Young rode the space shuttle Columbia into the black on its maiden voyage, he remarked that “…it’s lousy out there. It’s a hostile environment, and it’s trying to kill you. The outside temperature goes from a minus 450 degrees to a plus 300 degrees. You sit in a flying Thermos bottle.” And yet he willingly got into that Thermos bottle three times.
That’s a real hero in my book. Once upon a time, every school kid in America the names of the Mercury Seven. I doubt they do anymore, so let me repeat them here: John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, Gus Grissom, Alan Shepherd, Gordon Cooper, and Wally Schirra. With Schirra’s death, five of them are now gone. Only Glenn and Carpenter remain.
