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fiogf49gjkf0d Wally Schirra died this past week at the age of 84. He is partly responsible for the first demented music played in space (by an earthling that is!) :-) He was also a Jersey guy. RIP, Wally.
Wally Schirra's "UFO" sighting
By Owen Edwards
As a distant war was intensifying and the city of New Orleans was
slowly recovering from a hurricane's devastation, ten days before
Christmas 1965, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration got
an early holiday present: astronauts Walter M. "Wally" Schirra Jr. and
Thomas P. Stafford, aboard Gemini 6, rendezvoused in space with Gemini
7, piloted by Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.
Gemini 6 had been launched into orbit several days after Gemini 7.
Schirra and Stafford maneuvered their capsule to within a few feet of
the sister ship for the first, historic, prearranged meeting in space.
(Schirra then eased his craft away, and the crews settled in for a
short winter's nap.) The maneuver required the most exacting pilot and
computer control of a space vehicle yet attempted. Its success
demonstrated to Mission Control that when it came to linking two
vehicles in space, Houston did not have a problem.
Then, just before Stafford and Schirra were scheduled to reenter
Earth's atmosphere December 16, the pair reported they had sighted
some sort of UFO. Schirra recounted the moment when Stafford contacted Mission Control in Schirra's Space, a memoir he wrote with Richard Billings:
"We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south,
probably in polar orbit.... Looks like he might be going to re-enter
soon.... You just might let me pick up that thing.... I see a command
module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command
module is wearing a red suit."
Then ground controllers heard the strains, both familiar and
otherworldly, of "Jingle Bells," played on a harmonica backed by-what
else?-miniature sleigh bells. Today that harmonica, a tiny, four-hole,
eight-note Little Lady model manufactured by Hohner, as well as five
small bells of the kind that might embellish a Christmas wreath,
reside in a gallery on the second floor of the Smithsonian National
Air and Space Museum. The quirky artifacts, which Schirra and Stafford
donated in 1967, are included in a display of personal items
astronauts have taken into space, along with such standard-issue gear
as long underwear and survival knives. According to curator Margaret
A. Weitekamp, the harmonica and bells were the first musical
instruments ever played in space.
The right stuff may be a critical requirement for astronauts. But in
the early days of space exploration, there wasn't much room for stuff
of any kind, though each astronaut was allowed to bring along a
handful of personal items, usually consisting of small souvenirs the
astronauts wanted to bring back as presents. "I think people are
fascinated by the detail and textures of what people have taken into
space," Weitekamp says. "We want to remind the public that these
cramped quarters were the workplaces of these men. They wanted to
personalize their workplaces just as others personalize their offices
and cubicles."
Music, of course, was not new to space. Mission Control routinely used
recorded songs to wake up astronauts. But live music from space
represented a giant leap for the performing arts, not to mention
Santa's public relations. The astronauts' performance was a larky
gesture not equaled until Alan Shepard turned the lunar surface into a
golf driving range.
The Santa Claus plot had been hatched weeks before the Gemini 6
mission. "Wally came up with the idea," recalls Stafford, now a
retired Air Force general, who chairs an International Space Station
advisory group. "He could play the harmonica, and we practiced two or
three times before we took off, but of course we didn't tell the guys
on the ground....We never considered singing, since I couldn't carry a
tune in a bushelbasket."
"I could hear the voices at Mission Control getting tense," Stafford
adds, "when I talked about sighting something else up there with us.
Then, after we finished the song, [Mission Control's] Elliot See
relaxed and just said, 'You're too much.'"
(as posted to alt.obituaries by Pirate John)
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