{"id":373,"date":"2012-10-02T15:49:17","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T15:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=373"},"modified":"2020-12-12T22:40:37","modified_gmt":"2020-12-12T22:40:37","slug":"may-favorite-astronaut-or-zen-the-art-of-laughing-in-orbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=373","title":{"rendered":"My Favorite Astronaut, or Zen & the Art of Laughing in Orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Neil Armstrong is dead, and so for the time being is any substantial effort by America to put people in space. People forget to be dismissive or incredulous about manned-space-travel when they realize the shuttle\u2019s never flying again <\/a>\u2013 or when someone like Armstrong joins the ancestors. His impulse to spurn the glare of celebrity-hood <\/a>was duly noted and even praised by a culture that not too many years before (in part because of this semi-reclusive nature posthumously hailed as a virtue) would have easily mistaken him for any of the other men who flew during what we nostalgically term, \u201cThe Space Age.\u201d If you asked the average American to name an astronaut from the 1960s, they would likely have mentioned Armstrong for being The First Earthling on the Moon, but more likely would have named that archetypical all-American hero John Glenn and even James Lovell, who was some guy Tom Hanks played in a movie.<\/p>\n

Fifty years ago tomorrow morning, just as I was heading off to school, the man who would become my favorite among all the astronauts took his turn to ride a Mercury spacecraft into orbit<\/a>. Wally Schirra\u2019s nine-hour, six-orbit flight aboard Sigma 7 wasn\u2019t noteworthy for setting any world records. (The Russians had by then quadrupled our relatively meager number of manned orbits. It somehow seemed more fun in the days when we had some catching up to do.) Nor was it distinguished by any hair-raising crisis or daredevil flourishes. Indeed, the near-elegant perfection of Schirra\u2019s Mercury flight from lift-off to his precisely-timed splashdown was far more appreciated by engineers than by the general public.<\/p>\n

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Even I didn\u2019t take much note of Schirra\u2019s flight until I paid closer attention to a recording of his transmissions. (You could actually buy this stuff on 45 RPM back then.) I was struck by how utterly unfazed he seemed with everything. He was not only joking with communicators on the ground, he was even\u2026laughing! I don\u2019t remember hearing any of his fellow Project Mercury astronauts laughing up there. Not Glenn, not Scott Carpenter, not Alan Shepard; certainly not Gus Grissom. And Schirra\u2019s laughing wasn\u2019t the nervous tittering you put on to make yourself forget how high and far you are from everything you know. He was messing with the solemnity expected of this occasion in the same manner he\u2019d habitually mess with the ground crews or his peers. More than any of the others, he behaved up there the way I imagined my own father would: poking holes in other people\u2019s uptight modes for perspective\u2019s sake. As Tom Wolfe noted in The Right Stuff<\/em>: \u201cSchirra cut the jolly, fun-loving figure so well that people sometimes failed to notice how formidable he could be. But his emphasis, after all, was on maintaining an even strain, His pranksterish, rib-shaking, wild-driving gotcha intervals gave him plenty of slack when the time came to wind things up and get tight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Never was Schirra\u2019s Ultimate Cool more conspicuous than on the morning of December 12, 1965 when he and Thomas Stafford were supposed to have lifted off the pad in Gemini 6 for a history-making rendezvous mission with Gemini 7. When the countdown reached zero, their Titan II booster abruptly shut down. For several long-ish seconds, no one was quite sure if this was going to be a replay of one of those awful 1950s-newsreel moments when the whole missile was going to explode. And why, an anxious America wondered, hadn\u2019t the two pilots pulled their ejector rings? Apparently, Schirra, as command pilot, was exercising his prerogative to slow everybody\u2019s roll rather than kill the mission \u2013 or, quite possibly, him and his co-pilot \u2013 over what turned out to be some kind of mundane plug glitch. \u201cOK, we\u2019re just sitting here breathing,\u201d he calmly assured Mission Control. For this, he got another medal in addition to the one he received for carrying out the rendezvous three days later. Getting a medal for stillness rather than action \u2013 How very Zen!<\/p>\n

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