Wally Schirra Astronaut Quotations

I saw the booster, not Sputnik, flying by, and I said, maybe this is the way we should be going, not just sitting back waiting for something to happen.

At the end of our NASA careers, no one had a place for us in the military.

I have fought the centrifuge ever since. When I visited Star City in Russia, I told them, you guys don't need a centrifuge, they are a waste of time.

We have managed to hang in for 55 years, which isn't bad. My wife says our marriage has lasted so long because I was away half the time!

In Mercury, you couldn't translate. You could just change attitude. But you were actually flying it like a flying machine in Gemini.

Apollo was just too big, like flying a big transport airplane, which fighter pilots don't really revere. Gemini was just about the right size.

As a Naval officer, I was trained, essentially bred, to be a military aviator. I was a Naval officer on assignment, not an employee of NASA.

Within NASA, there were lots of things that were not appropriate to bring out to the public, because the press did not handle it well.