The world lost another of the Mercury Seven today. Walter M. Schirra, Jr. died of a heart attack today at the age of 84.
We live in a world where men have walked on the moon. Space flight has become mundane. It barely makes the news when NASA launches another vehicle into space.
What we take for granted, Wally Schirra and his fellow space travellers made possible.
A few weeks ago I took my six year old daughter to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. The first spacecraft we saw as we entered the museum was Friendship 7, the capsule that carried John Glenn around the Earth on February 20, 1962. As I lifted my daughter up to peer through the small window into the capsule, I knew my daughter had caught the "space bug". I caught the same bug three decades ago when my own father took me to the very same museum. Wally Schirra and his fellow Mercury astronauts, including John Glenn, made it possible for kids like me, and now my daughter, to dream a little bigger.
Wally Schirra, may he rest in peace.
- Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
- And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
- Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
- of sun-split clouds, —and done a hundred things
- You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
- High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
- I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
- My eager craft through footless halls of air….
- Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
- I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
- Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
- And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
- The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
- – John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
