US Astronaut, Wally Schirra dies at 84

According to an announcement by NASA, Wally Schirra, a leading US Astronaut, who pioneered the space program for the United States, had died at the age of 84. Wally Schirra suffered a heart attack and died on Thursday in a hospital near his home in California.

Wally Schirra had helped lead the United States into the space age by being one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts. He was the only astronaut, who had flown all the US space programs, namely, Mercury, Apollo and Gemini.

In 1962, Wally Schirra got the prestige of becoming the third American astronaut, who orbited the earth, in a flight that continued for more than nine hours, and encircled the globe six times.

After his flight around the globe in 1962, Schirra, went back to space in 1965, commandeering Gemini 6 and guiding it towards Gemini 7. His last rendezvous in the space was the flight which inaugurated the Apollo program, which later on put men on the moon.

Wally Schirra was an exceptional man, and during his training left everyone amazed with his stamina and skills. Extremely self-assured, he went through scrupulous astronaut training with what one reporter called "the ease of preparing for a family picnic."

"No one has flown better than you," the NASA administrator, James Webb, told him a few days later.

Even though, Schirra never walked on the moon, but his previous missions laid some very solid foundations for the missions to come. After the Apollo 7 mission, which lasted for 11 days, Schirra resigned from the NASA, and also retired from the Navy, bearing the rank of a Captain.

His total time spent in space summed up to 295 hours and 154 minutes. "Mostly it's lousy out there," Schirra said in 1981 on the occasion of the first space shuttle flight. "It's a hostile environment, and it's trying to kill you. The outside temperature goes from a minus 450 degrees to a plus 300 degrees. You sit in a flying Thermos bottle."