Nation: The Strain of Fame

Some time next week, Navy Commander Walter M. Schirra Jr. is supposed to blast off on a six-orbit space trip around the earth. But last week Schirra blasted off without ever leaving the ground. And what he said sent officials scurrying for their hard hats.

Appearing in a CBS television interview, Schirra had a few words about the postorbital activities of Astronaut John Glenn, who has recently been making appearances ranging from the Seattle World’s Fair to Everett Dirksen’s frivolous Anti-Superstition Society, while sandwiching in some water-skiing with Jacqueline Kennedy and attendance at a Bobby Kennedy pool party.

Said Schirra: “I think John’s had a pretty hard pull lately. His commitments have just about wiped him out of the space program. He hasn’t been able to maintain the currency that he should have with the rest of us, and we have frantic meetings trying to keep each other up to date on what he has been doing technically and what we’ve been doing technically. John’s falling behind. We need him to help us on a lot of decisions.” Responding to Interviewer Walter Cronkite’s questioning about “the strain of fame,” Schirra added: “We shouldn’t have to pay the penalty of publicity and being show biz in the sense of going to various gala affairs. If it’s a scientific meeting where our attendance can contribute to the program, where scientists and other engineers can get some firsthand reports from us, it’s our obligation to be there. Naturally, we’re indebted to the country. We’ve got to pay them back and give them this information, but we don’t have to give them an appearance. We’ve done that, and I sort of feel badly about having to overcommit ourselves to these extraneous appearances.” Schirra also complained about NASA’s nearly 40-minute delay in flashing word to an anxious world that Astronaut Scott Carpenter’s capsule had survived re-entry at the end of his triple orbit on May 24. “We knew where Scott was,” said Schirra. “I was in Mercury Control, and we had six beautiful radar fixes within six miles of where Scott landed. We had telemetry after the blackout which meant he had gone through the ‘G’ pulse. We had a lot of information there, and yet it never came out, and it was disgusting. I don’t feel badly about harpooning someone on this because if they do it to me I’m going to be furious.” When Cronkite raised a touchy question about whether the astronauts feel that no new men should be sent aloft until all of the original seven get “a fair share of missions,” Schirra had another forthright answer: “I’ll never deny that. If I did, I’d be lying—you know it.”