Astronaut judges posters and essays; winners to get free trip to space camp

Schirra says the United States needs to keep sending people into space.
By MONICA BOND
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
NILES -- One of America's first astronauts says the U.S. space program doesn't need to be turned over to machines.
Former Project Mercury astronaut Walter M. Schirra is the only one to have flown Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions.
He came to Niles on Friday at the invitation of the family of the late Terence M. Lynch, a Youngstown native who died in the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon, to help judge a poster/essay scholarship contest.
The scholarships from the Terry Lynch Foundation will be awarded to 20 Youngstown area children ages 10-18 to attend a space camp the week of July 18 at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Winners will be announced at 4 p.m. today.
Biography
Schirra, 82, was born in Hackensack, N.J., and came from a family of flyers: His father flew in World War I and his mother was a "wing walker."
"I like to say I began flying when I was still in the hangar," he said.
Schirra graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1945. He said he was a "hot shot" pilot testing the new Mach II jet who dreamed of becoming a rear admiral. Space flight was not in his plans.
"I was ordered to Washington; I wasn't interested one bit," he said. "I kept saying, 'Why don't you take the man from the circus who shoots out of a cannon into a net and let him do the job?'"
The Project Mercury astronauts competed fiercely with each other, and Schirra said they bonded much more closely than brothers or the military.
"The sibling rivalry was there, but the bond was closer," he said. "We competed, but we also collaborated."
He was the pilot of the fifth Project Mercury flight, Sigma 7, which orbited the Earth six times in October 1962. He was command pilot of Gemini 6, the first rendezvous of two spacecraft.
The opportunity to fly "higher, farther and faster" than anyone else soon motivated Schirra and he began dreaming of a lunar mission. But "having had an Apollo mission, I knew I would not get a second Apollo mission, that was the rule if you commanded one," he said.
He was command pilot of Apollo 7 in 1968, the first mission after the loss of Apollo 1 in a launchpad fire. He had been backup commander for that mission.
Schirra said his most memorable experience as an astronaut is "probably the Gemini mission when I did that rendezvous." It had never been done before.
"That was probably the first U.S. mission that surpassed the Soviets," he said. "They weren't able to do that for years."
He said his least favorite experience in the space program was "losing the crew on the launch pad" in the Apollo 1 mission.
Space program
Schirra said the importance of the space program then was beating the Soviets and getting to the moon and back.
"The space program was a big part of our victory over the Soviets; and also proving that we could do what we said we could do," he said.
The most important thing now to keep the space program alive is keeping people in space and not turning it over to the machines, he said.
Schirra believes the standard of the space program has been lowered because the astronauts no longer have a connection to the engineers.
"In our day we were all graduated engineers and test pilots, and worked closely with the engineers," he said. "We could talk to any of those people. There never was a door closed." But now "those doors have been closed, and as a result the crews are not as aware of what is going on," he added.
Schirra said he was quite a prankster as an astronaut -- "still am," he said laughing.
But he said his favorite prank was one pulled on him by fellow Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard.
"I'd bought a pre-owned Ferrari -- one does not buy a 'used' Ferrari -- and was bringing it back from St. Louis to Houston," he said. "My wife was in on this deal and kept telling the guys where I was. I finally drove it over to our astronaut office, parked it next to [fellow astronaut] Scott Carpenter's Shelby Cobra, which looked all right, but the Ferrari looked much better."
Schirra said he looked out the window and saw Shepard driving up in an Indianapolis speed racing car.
"My Ferrari now looked like a Model A," he said laughing. "I loved that one."