Word: schirra
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Calm & Effective. Perhaps. But there was little doubt last week that much of the credit for the successful rendezvous belonged to casual Wally Schirra, who, at 42, is the oldest astronaut flying. It was his cool and seasoned performance during the abortive Sunday launch of Gemini 6 that made the midweek triumph possible. Had he panicked and pulled the Dring ("chicken switch") that would have ejected him and Copilot Stafford from the Gemini capsule, the mission could probably not have been sent aloft on time. His superb piloting of the capsule, perfected in long hours of practice in the Houston...
...World War I fighter pilot and a mother who had been a wing walker in a flying circus, Schirra took to the air naturally. An Annapolis graduate who flew 90 combat missions in Korea, he is a fast mover on the earth, too, in a maroon Maserati...
...Schirra's quiet but effective copilot, Tom Stafford, 35, is a topflight aeronautical engineer. His rapid slide-rule calculations supplemented the information supplied by the ship's on-board computer and helped keep the crew and the men in Houston on top of the spacecraft's rapidly changing position. Also an Annapolis man, Stafford decided to make his career in the Air Force, has written two handbooks on flight-testing programs...
...Made It. In their less glamorous, but physically more demanding roles aboard Gemini 7, Frank Borman and James Lovell demonstrated a neat combination of endurance, stoicism and humor that was vital to their mission's success. Like Schirra, Borman, 37, was air-oriented from youth, building model airplanes and later selling newspapers to pay for flying lessons. He ranked eighth in his graduating class at West Point before he joined the Air Force. Then an eardrum broken during a practice dive-bombing run made him doubt that he would ever fly again. He was delighted when recovery proved...
...nearly jumped off her living-room couch at lift-off and was still jumping up and down an hour later. Marilyn Lovell, expecting her fourth child soon, was also in high spirits. "I'm just stopping by on my way to the hospital," she joked. Jo Schirra tried to take the excitement in stride, sent her two children to school after Gemini 6's blastoff. But the following morning, when Schirra stepped aboard the Wasp, Jo Schirra admitted that she had found "every bit" of the mission exciting. The flawless recovery, she said, was "even more than...