[X] My Assistant

[David]

Walter M. "Wally" Schirra has died today. He was eighty-four years old.

Only two of the original "Mercury Seven" astronauts remain alive today.

[Guest_Analyst_*]

It is interesting to speculate what might have happened had Wally elected to stay in Apollo instead of pursuing some lucrative external opportunities.

I strongly doubt if he would ever get a mission after his Apollo 7 "performance" with mission control. The two other crew members never did.

Analyst

[dvandorn]

I strongly doubt if he would ever get a mission after his Apollo 7 "performance" with mission control. The two other crew members never did.

True, although if Wally had been promised one of the first moon landings and thereby had a stake in currying favor, I imagine he would have worked on being less of a pain in the butt than he was on that mission.

Besides, Deke would have had to break his crew rotation rules to fly Schirra twice in four missions. Deke's rotation was that a member of a prime crew could be named a member of the *back-up* crew three flights down (i.e., fly one, skip two, backup one, skip two...). Had Schirra decided he wanted a moon landing (assuming Deke would have given him one) and stayed in the program, the best he could have hoped for would have been being back-up CDR of Apollo 10, which would have led to being the CDR of Apollo 13. (After Schirra retired, Gordo Cooper was given the BCDR slot on Apollo 10, but Slayton was leaning towards *not* giving him Apollo 13, if he had a choice.)

That also brings up the fact that had Schirra decided to stay in the program for Apollo 13, there would have been the same issue that Cooper had with Shepard, once Smilin' Al was re-certified to fly. If Al was going to bump Cooper, he would also have bumped Wally. And I doubt Wally would have stayed in to back up Shepard and hope for command of Apollo 16. Cooper sure didn't (though Cooper probably wasn't going to get 16, either).

One final crew rotation note -- there was one and only one instance during Mercury, Gemini and Apollo in which someone went straight from prime to prime after skipping only two flights. That was Tom Stafford, who was the PLT on Gemini 6 and the CDR on Gemini 9. This only happened because the original Gemini 9 crew, Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, were killed in an airplane crash; otherwise, Stafford would have gone from prime on 6 to back-up on 9, and would have ended up commanding Gemini 12. The interesting thing is that, because of the failure of Gemini 6's Agena target vehicle and the plan to press Gemini 7 into service as Gemini 6's rendezvous target, only one mission was launched between Stafford's two Gemini launches. The order of launch was Gemini 7, Gemini 6, Gemini 8 and then Gemini 9. I'm not certain, but I believe that the roughly six months between Stafford's two Gemini flights was the shortest time between launches for a single person in American spaceflight history. (There was a Shuttle flight that was aborted after only a day or so in orbit, due to a fuel cell problem, which was re-flown with the same vehicle, payload and crew several months later, but I'm pretty sure that more time passed between that flight/re-flight than between Stafford's two Gemini flights.)

-the other Doug