THEY WERE America’s first astronauts and there was a time when many Americans could name all seven of them: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton.
Wally Schirra died Thursday and now there are only two of the Mercury Seven left — Carpenter and Glenn.
Only one of the seven died on the job. Gus Grissom was killed in 1967 in a flash fire aboard a capsule on the launch pad in Florida. The others died of earthbound diseases. That is, in a way, a tribute to the people who designed and built the nation’s first spacecraft.
Schirra was the only astronaut to fly in all three of the first space programs — the one-man Mercury capsules, the two-man Gemini capsules and the three-man Apollo ships that would take the next generation of spacefarers to the moon and back. He became a familiar face in news reports.
Even after he retired as an astronaut, Schirra remained close to the space program. He signed on with CBS as a resident space-flight expert and became a fixture, along with Walter Cronkite, on the live broadcasts of launches. With his breezy manner and ability to explain complex ideas in simple language, he helped bring the American people into the space age.
It does not seem possible that almost 40 years have passed since Wally Schirra last flew into space. In that time, space flight has become almost ordinary — despite the two shuttle disasters — and the people who fly in space have become ordinary people whose names are known by few.
Being an astronaut has always required courage, but Schirra and his fellows were the first, and that took an extra measure of courage.
And they set the nation on the path to the moon.