Wally Schirra

Walter Marty "Wally" Schirra Jr. (March 12, 1923 – May 3, 2007), (Captain, USN), was an American naval aviator and astronaut. He was one of the original seven astronauts chosen for Project Mercury, the United States' first effort to put human beings in space. On October 3, 1962, he flew the six-orbit, nine-hour, Mercury-Atlas 8 mission, in a spacecraft he nicknamed Sigma 7, becoming the fifth American, and ninth human, to travel to space. In the two-man Gemini program, he achieved the first space rendezvous, station-keeping his Gemini 6A spacecraft within 1 ft of the sister Gemini 7 spacecraft in December 1965. In October 1968, he commanded Apollo 7, an 11-day low Earth orbit shakedown test of the three-man Apollo Command/Service Module and the first manned launch for the Apollo program. He was the first astronaut to go into space three times, and the only astronaut to have flown in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. In total, he logged 295 hours and 15 minutes in space. After Apollo 7, he retired from the U.S. Navy with the rank of captain and from NASA, becoming a consultant to CBS News for its coverage of the subsequent Apollo flights. He joined Walter Cronkite as co-anchor for the seven Moon landing missions.