Schirra rides Sigma 7 into orbit, six times around on the Mercury program's first full-day test
By October 1962, NASA had put two Americans into orbit, but never for more than a few turns of the globe. On October 3, an Atlas booster lifted Walter Schirra and his capsule Sigma 7 off the pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a six-orbit endurance test of the hardware itself. Nine hours and thirteen minutes later, Sigma 7 splashed down in the Pacific less than half a mile from the recovery carrier USS Kearsarge. Schirra used less fuel than engineers had planned for, and Schirra used less fuel than engineers had planned for, evidence the hardware could handle more time in orbit, and NASA used the result to plan a full day in orbit the following year.
Sigma 7's fuel-sparing, nearly flawless flight gave NASA the engineering confidence to schedule Mercury-Atlas 9 as a full day-long mission in 1963, the final step before Gemini and Apollo. It mattered less in the headlines than Glenn's flight had, because three weeks later the Cuban Missile Crisis consumed the nation's attention, the Cuban Missile Crisis simply crowded the flight off the front page.
QWhat nickname did Schirra give the capsule when it ran entirely on autopilot?
Crossing over Mexico, Schirra radioed that he was in "chimp configuration," a wry jab at the fact that the Mercury program had first tested its capsules with trained chimpanzees before putting humans aboard. With the spacecraft flying itself on automatic systems and no pilot input required, Schirra was, by his own joke, just along for the ride like the chimps before him. It was a pilot's way of noting how much of the mission depended on hardware rather than his own hands.
QWhat star-navigation experiment gave Schirra more trouble than expected?
During the dark half of his second orbit, Schirra tried using first the Moon and then known stars as fixed points to practice yaw maneuvers. The Moon worked fine, but the stars did not: the Mercury capsule's windows were so small that they gave only a narrow field of view, making it difficult to pick out full constellations for reference. It was a reminder that even a spacecraft engineered down to the pound could be limited by something as basic as window size.
QWhat satellite did Schirra try and fail to spot from orbit?
On his fourth orbit, passing over East Africa, Schirra scanned the sky for Echo 1, a large reflective balloon satellite NASA had launched two years earlier as an early communications experiment. He never managed to pick it out against the sky. The attempt never made it into mission headlines, though it was part of testing the pilot's eyes and judgment as much as the capsule's machinery.
