SAN DIEGO — Walter M. "Wally" Schirra Jr., who as one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts combined the right stuff — textbook-perfect flying ability and steely nerves — with a pronounced rebellious streak, died Thursday at 84.
He was the only astronaut to fly in all three of NASA's original manned spaceflight programs: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Although he never walked on the moon, Schirra laid some of the groundwork that made the lunar landings possible and won the space race for the U.S.
Schirra died of a heart attack at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, said Ruth Chandler Varonfakis, a family friend and spokeswoman for the San Diego Aerospace Museum.
In 1962, the former Navy test pilot became the fifth American in space — behind Alan Shepard, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter — and the third American to orbit the Earth, circling the globe six times in a flight that lasted more than nine hours.
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Schirra returned to space in 1965 as commander of Gemini 6. About 185 miles above Earth, he guided his two-man capsule to within a few feet of Gemini 7 in the first rendezvous of two spacecraft in orbit.
On his third and final flight, aboard Apollo 7 in 1968, he helped set the stage for the landing of men on moon during the summer of 1969.
An inveterate prankster, he could be grumpy and recalcitrant in space.
During the mid-December 1965 Gemini flight, he and his crewmate, Thomas Stafford, unnerved Mission Control when they reported, slowly and in deadpan fashion, seeing some kind of UFO consisting of "a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit" — Santa Claus.
Then Schirra and Stafford played "Jingle Bells" on a tiny, smuggled-aboard harmonica and a set of sleigh bells.
In one of his last interviews, last month with The Associated Press, Schirra said he was struck by the fragility of Earth and the lack of borders.
"I left Earth three times. I found no place else to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth," he said.
View an audio slide show on the life of Walter M. Schirra Jr.:
