Walter Marty "Wally" Schirra Jr. (March 12, 1923 – May 3, 2007), (CAPT, USN), was an American naval aviator and astronaut. He was one of the original seven astronauts chosen for Project Mercury, the first effort by the United States to put humans in space. On October 3, 1962, he flew a six-orbit, nine-hour, Mercury-Atlas 8 mission 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 foot (30 cm) 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. He was the first person to go into space three times, and the only person to have flown in Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, logging a total of 295 hours and 15 minutes in space. He retired from the U.S. Navy at the rank of captain and from NASA after his Apollo flight, 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.
