Schirra's Space by Wally Schirra with Richard N. Billings

Between 1961 and 1972, NASA flew all of its manned missions in three distinct, successive programs. The first, Mercury, proved a man could survive and carry out tasks in outer space. The second, Gemini, demonstrated that longer-duration flights of more complexity were possible. The third, Apollo, applied and expanded upon this experience, taking astronauts to the moon. The overall crew roster for these missions included more than 40 individuals. Only one of them flew a mission in all three programs: Wally Schirra.

Schirra published his memoir, Schirra’s Space, in 1988. He cowrote the book with former Life magazine correspondent Richard N. Billings. In some ways, the book is very much of its time. Schirra advocates for his own vision of the future of human spaceflight, and he is highly critical of the direction of the nation’s space program circa 1988. Just a few years removed from the Challenger disaster, Schirra was writing from firmly in the midst of the Shuttle era, but long before the International Space Station (ISS) got off the ground. He forcefully calls for a permanent manned outpost in Earth orbit, something that of course eventually came to fruition with the ISS. (Though in reality, the ISS never became a jumping-off point for deep-space manned missions, as he calls for in the book.)

Such policy recommendations are largely confined to the book’s introductory and concluding sections; the bulk of Schirra’s Space is a relatively straightforward memoir. I’m happy to report that it’s a successful one. One hallmark of a good memoir is that the reader feels as though he or she is getting a distinctly personal perspective on the events described. A strong narrative voice allows the writer’s personality to shine through, turning what could be a dry recounting of events into a slice of living, breathing history.

When a book like this is coauthored, I’m always a little wary, as there’s no way to know how much of the subject’s voice is lost in the collaborative writing process. But here, as with Deke!, the reader is treated to a clear, singular tone that meshes well with the personality displayed in the book’s events (and with other accounts of Schirra’s NASA career). We get a three-dimensional portrait of Schirra: he’s an ultra-confident, ultra-competent engineer/pilot with a confessed lack of modesty about his skills and extreme rigidity when it comes to the safety of his crew. At the same time, he’s a punster and prankster who targets those around him with practical jokes—what he calls “gotchas”—as a sign of high respect. (His penchant for humor was shared by his Apollo 7 crewmate Donn Eisesle, as I wrote about in my review of Apollo Pilot.)

Relatively little of the book goes into Schirra’s experiences during the actual missions. For instance, less than 10 of the book’s 227 pages cover the duration of the Apollo 7 flight. However, this didn’t end up bothering me, for two reasons. First, in reality only a tiny fraction of an astronaut’s career is spent in space. The vast majority is spent training on the ground, so in a way the book presents an accurate picture of Schirra’s career. Second, the mechanical details of the missions are found in many other sources—we don’t need Schirra to rotely repeat them all here. Instead, Schirra puts a heavy focus on his relationships with the other astronauts and the camaraderie that formed between them. Of particular interest to Schirra are the vast number of “gotchas” he pulled; it’s clear he relishes their retellings here. These little tidbits are windows into the daily lives of the astronauts that we don’t get elsewhere, and they make the book feel authentic and specific. (Adding to the authenticity is Schirra’s willingness to keep intact the profanity that sometimes accompanies these jokes and gags, rather than bowdlerizing it for the reader).

While we don’t learn terribly much about Schirra’s Apollo mission, we do get quite a bit on information on his early life and naval career. He flew missions in the Korean War and later became a test pilot of such fighters as the Vought F7U Cutlass. It’s his experience as a fighter pilot that seems to have colored his later interests in spaceflight.

To explain this, a bit of background is needed. From the aviation memoirs I’ve read, it’s evident that pilots of fighter jets treasure their machines’ quickness and aerial agility, disdaining the idea of flying a large, lumbering bomber or transport plane.

Schirra draws the same comparison when comparing Gemini and Apollo. The two-man Gemini spacecraft, clocking in at around 3,500 kilograms, is relatively light and nimble. When Schirra and Gemini 6 crewmate Thomas Stafford rendezvous with Gemini 7 in orbit, Schirra is able to use quick taps on his control thrusters to scoot around Gemini 7 and inspect the vessel. But on the three-man Apollo ship, massing around 15,000 kilograms for an Earth-orbital mission like Apollo 7 (and nearly 29,000 kilos for a lunar flight), movements are necessarily much slower and more deliberate. Though the Apollo Command/Service Module is significantly more technically advanced than the Gemini spacecraft, Schirra describes his Gemini flight as the pinnacle of his career.

In many ways Gemini takes center stage in Schirra’s account, but Apollo does play a significant role. The Apollo 1 fire in January 1967 affects him deeply, not just because Gus Grissom, a fellow member of the Mercury 7, was a close friend. The tragedy sharpens Schirra’s focus on the safety of himself and his crew, and he takes a more intensive, hands-on role in ensuring that NASA and its contractors are not rushing back into flight with Apollo 7. With plans to retire after the mission, Schirra is able to dispose with the politics of future flight assignments, not caring if his blunt, opinionated, intensely mission-oriented attitude burns bridges before or during the flight:

As the space program matured, so had I. I was no longer the boy in scarf and goggles, the Jolly Wally of space age lore. . . . I resolved that the mission would not be jeopardized by the influence of special interests—scientific, political, whatever. I was annoyed by people who did not consider the total objective of the mission. I would not be an affable fellow when it came to decisions that affected the safety of myself and my two mates.

After reading for years about the infamous “space mutiny” of Apollo 7, in which Schirra defied Mission Control requests that he deemed unnecessary or risky, it was fascinating to read about the reasoning behind that behavior. It’s clear here that Schirra was not being a petulant pilot, but rather was working in what he believed to be the best interest of his crew, his thinking colored by the then-recent Apollo 1 disaster. The result is a fleshed-out portrait not just of Schirra himself, but also of the mission and its place in history.