![]() Schirra completed a total of 3,200 flying hours throughout his career before retiring from the Navy with the rank of captain and leaving NASA in 1969. He was also the first astronaut to go into space three times. Walter Wally Schirra poses in his Mercury pressure suit with a model of the Mercury spacecraft behind him. Onboard the Mercury-Atlas VIII flight in 1962, he became the fifth American in space, the third American to orbit Earth and the ninth human to travel into space. Original Astronaut Wally Schirra Dies at 84. He participated in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo Programs and was the only astronaut to be involved in all three. In 1959, he became one of seven astronauts chosen for the Mercury Program. Schirra also had an extensive career with NASA. Upon his return to the U.S., he attended safety school at the University of Southern California before receiving pilot training at the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent River, Maryland, graduating in 1958. He was thereafter assigned to Fighter Squad 124, deploying to the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier, in the Pacific in 1956. There, he helped develop the Sidewinder missile, later becoming the first pilot to fire the missile. Air Force Fighter-Bomber Squadron before being ordered to the Naval Ordnance Test Station China Lake in California in 1952. He then served in Korea from June to December 1951, flying 90 combat missions with the 154th U.S. Schirra earned his wings in June 1948, becoming a naval aviator and joining Fighter Squadron 71 at Naval Air Station Quonset Point in Rhode Island. Later, acting on a long-held desire to fly for the military, he attended the Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida in 1948, where he began training as a naval aviator. ![]() He was then stationed in Tsingtao, China, and assigned to USS Estes, an amphibious command ship. Afterwards, he served in Okinawa, Japan, aboard USS Alaska, a large cruiser, as a turret officer. joined World War II, Schirra left college to enter the Naval Academy, graduating in 1945 as a commissioned ensign in the Navy. He graduated from high school in 1940 and enrolled in the Newark College of Engineering. In 1966, Astronauts Wally Schirra and Frank Borman made an eight-week Goodwill trip to Asia and Australia. astronaut who flew the Mercury Sigma 7 (1962) and was command pilot of Gemini 6 (1965), which made the first rendezvous in space. Today’s #VeteranOfTheDay is Navy Veteran Walter “Wally” Schirra Jr., who served as a Navy pilot during World War II and the Korean War before becoming a NASA astronaut. Wally Schirra, in full Walter Marty Schirra, Jr., (born March 12, 1923, Hackensack, New Jersey, U.S.died May 3, 2007, La Jolla, California), U.S. Yesterday, it was exactly 54 years ago that astronaut Walter ‘Wally’ Schirra orbited Earth 6 times in the Sigma 7 spacecraft. ![]()
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