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'I worked with NASA, not for NASA' (cont'd)
Following his successful flight, Schirra resigned from NASA in July, 1969. Fifteen days later, Apollo 11 was on the way to the Moon, and Schirra partnered Walter Cronkite during the television coverage of the mission. Looking back now, Schirra says he is still undecided as to whether Apollo was a stunt or not.
"In essence, as I look back on it, the timeframe was that we had a real beautiful Cold War going on. The challenge was that we had made a mess, or Kennedy had made a mess, in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. In retrospect it seems that he had to do something to look good. The Apollo program concept of going to the Moon and back before the decade was out was quite a goal, which we all accepted, because we all loved the man. He was the only young, committed President we've ever had. We've lost that kind of commitment since. And yet, in fact, if you think of the inherent risk that we had, and the amount of effort the country went to - because just about everybody went to work on it - it's quite apparent that we were somewhat set up, I would say. We should have done it, but we didn't need to do it in that big a hurry. It would have been a much better program to have real piloted vehicles all the way through. In fact, von Braun made quite an issue at one point about having an Earth orbit rendezvous. Then going from Earth orbit with the vehicle to the Moon, then back to Earth orbit rendezvous. Guess what that is - International Space Station! We wouldn't have got there so quick, but we'd have something left for it."
"The word 'stunt' also applies in the sense that once we did it, everybody forgot about it. When I was broadcasting the Apollo missions with Walter Cronkite, the audience dropped tremendously, to a point where we couldn't even get airtime at the end. So when I look back on it in retrospect, I think of it that way."
 Schirra wrote his autobiography, "Schirra's Space", in 1988, and outlined how he would have liked to have seen the space program develop - full use of the space shuttle, a space station, and a space tug. Thirteen years later, things have not turned out as he hoped.
"The station has not met the big goals as a scientific station, which it was supposed to be. If you bring a tourist in there, what is he going to do to the zero-G environment if he bumps into something? I had been on a review of the commercial use of space back in the early 80's. The Secretary of the Interior had formed a board of advisors for that particular project. We had senior officers from major corporations. We all concluded that there was no way you could make money in space. One of the senior officers, a company chairman, was asked, 'Would you put your stuff on these flights for science evaluation if you had to pay your way?' He said, 'No way, I couldn't afford to do that.' That pretty well makes the point. The space station was developed as a result, to bring the price of experimentation down to reality. They're not going to do it the way they are doing it now."
"I don't think the space station will ever do anything for exploration. I think the idea of putting people up there for a year or more is the only way you will get anywhere near the exploration concept. Now they are just getting started - not the time to think about going to Mars at all. If anything, NASA should start thinking about this planet, and creating a much more efficient booster. We had a project called NERVA back in the sixties. That was dropped - and it might today be just the way to start doing things."
"NASA has changed since Kennedy's day, too. A lot of people have become older, and left. But attitudes have changed, too. One of my rules was, always keep the door open. Come in anytime and talk about something. Recently, the doors have been closing rather regularly. Now you have to fight the bureaucracy - a bureaucracy is a closed-door organization. Send a memo instead. The excitement we had in the early days was the fun of working on something new, and challenging, and devoting a lot of time to it."
"That's like when people have asked if I'd like to go in the Shuttle - I said you don't get to fly it, except for landing, which I'd love to do. The rest of it is just boring holes, which I did - I've done all that. I wouldn't go unless I could command it, and that would take two to three years of training. I wouldn't want to spend that much time. I wouldn't do what Glenn did. I already have more flight time than Glenn has even now! When they asked me if I was jealous of John's shuttle flight, I said 'No, I'm not that old! I don't need the flight time, I have 300 hours in space; he had five! I too would have done anything to get out of the US Senate!' I used to do that to Shepard too, kidding him that it took me longer to get down on each of my three flights than he was up there on his first one. We had so much fun teasing. I miss him so much; we teased all the time."
A few weeks after we had lunch, I ran into Schirra again at a party. Over the noise in the room, I asked him if he was enjoying himself. He loudly exclaimed, "No!"
Surprised, I asked him to elaborate and tell me why not, as it seemed a very enjoyable party.
"Oh," he grinned, "I thought you asked if I was behaving myself!"
Such is Wally Schirra.
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References:
Wally Schirra with Richard Billings, Schirra's Space, Bluejacket Books,
1995.
Donald Slayton with Michael Cassutt, Deke! U.S. Manned Space: From Mercury to the
Shuttle, Forge Books, 1994.
Walter Cunningham with Mickey Herskowitz, The All-American Boys, Macmillan,
1977.
The Astronauts, We Seven, Simon and Schuster, 1962.
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979.
My thanks to Wally and Jo Schirra, Colin Burgess, Erin French, and Jody Russell of the NASA JSC Media Resource Center, Houston, for their time and assistance with this article.
Copyright for this article is retained by Francis French. A condensed version of this interview has previously appeared in printed form.
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