“‘A Textbook Flight’”: Walter M. Schirra, Jr.,
and the Flight of Sigma 7

Before dawn on October, 3, 1962, Cmdr. Walter M. Schirra (USN) slipped into his spacecraft, named Sigma 7, and at 7:15 a.m. was launched in to space, becoming the third American to orbit the earth—six circuits of the planet. MA-8, mission planners agreed, would constitute a needed intermediate step between the three-orbit flights of his predecessors Glenn and Carpenter and the daylong 22-orbit goal then being considered as the capstone mission for Project Mercury.

During the flight of Sigma 7, Schirra would further investigate navigation in yaw (using yaw-recognition displays as aids), with particular emphasis on the role of the periscope, which Carpenter had recommended be discarded after MA-7.1 Schirra would also report on the modified control system, which at Carpenter’s suggestion had been redesigned to include a fuel-saving “control-mode selector switch . . . that would seal off the high thrusters until they were needed for fast-reaction maneuvers.”

In addition, because interservice misunderstandings and “communication breakdowns” were reported to have marred recovery operations for MA-7, communications were reworked for MA-8. In fact, Maj. Gen. Leighton I. Davis (USAF), the DOD’s military representative, reported to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara that “the delay at Mercury Control in the decision to pick up Carpenter” had been caused in part by the “lack of direct communication with the astronaut” and that the “extended period of suspense that climaxed Carpenter’s mission should never happen again in Project Mercury.”2

Responding to the criticism, the recovery room in the Mercury Control Center made amends: it duly outfitted Schirra’s spacecraft with communications equipment that would permit him to maintain voice contact with recovery forces—even from a life raft.

Like Carpenter, Schirra too encountered problems with an overheating suit, but adjusted the control knob early during his first pass to find a good setting and a tolerable temperature—and to keep it there for most of his six-orbit flight. His work with yaw navigation and the periscope caused him to conclude, as Carpenter had during MA-7, that the periscope was useless: “I couldn’t see schmatze through it!”3 The periscope was discarded for the final Mercury mission.

After a nine hour, thirteen-minute flight, Sigma 7 landed in the waters of the Pacific, in full view of the crew of the USS Kearsarge and its news crews. “‘It was a textbook flight,’ Schirra declared to the physicians examining him aboard the carrier, ‘The flight went just the way I wanted it to’.”4

For more information, on Wally Schirra, who went on to command both a Gemini and an Apollo mission, please visit his official website.