Word: schirra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wally Schirra, to be sure, had never succumbed to the growing pessimism. "If we had 999 chances out of 1,000 of having a successful flight," he explained, in a preflight interview for the National Broadcasting Company, "no one would want the 1,000th flight. But you don't add up a whole bunch of flights and say we're due for a failure. It's 999 out of 1,000 on each flight...
...October, when an Agena rendezvous rocket "backfired" and disintegrated in space, Schirra and Stafford were left sitting in Gemini 6 atop a Titan II on a Cape Kennedy launch pad. They were all dressed up with no place to go. Last week their first attempt to launch was frustrated when a monitoring-cable plug was accidentally jarred loose from the Titan II's tail, causing an automatic shutdown of its engines only two seconds before liftoff. Later investigation disclosed that the engines would have shut down anyway-on either of the first two launching attempts. Workmen had forgotten...
...Schirra's statistics sounded like whistling in the dark. Even the omens were bad. During the aborted launch attempt, a Cape Kennedy rescue helicopter crash-landed in nearby Banana River. Then word was received that NASA's respected director of space medicine, Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace, and his wife were missing on a private plane flight. Search parties later found their bodies beside the plane's wreckage near Aspen, Colo...
...Delicate Balance. On the day of the successful rendezvous, however, the fog that had shrouded Cape Kennedy during the night-and the cloud that had hovered over Gemini 6 even longer -suddenly blew away. "For the third time, go," exulted Schirra just before the Titan II left the pad in a launch that was as close to perfect as any in all the Cape's history...
During the first three orbits of Gemini 6, Command Pilot Schirra made a number of ground-computed corrective maneuvers. To change his elliptical orbit into a circle that reached up closer to Gemini 7, he made several "posigrade" burns-bursts from his forward-thrusting rockets. At two hours and 18 minutes after launch, for instance, Schirra made a posigrade burn when Gemini 6 reached its second apogee over the Indian Ocean. That thrust helped the change from ellipse to circle by increasing the perigee from 100 to 140 miles above the earth; following the laws of orbital mechanics, though...