Walter Marty "Wally" Schirra, Jr. (March 12, 1923 – May 3, 2007), (
Capt,
USN), was an
American naval officer and
aviator,
aeronautical engineer,
test pilot, and one of the
original seven astronauts chosen for
Project Mercury, United States first effort to put humans in
space. He flew the six-orbit, nine-hour
Mercury-Atlas 8 mission on October 3, 1962, becoming the fifth American, and the ninth human, to ride a rocket into space. In the two-man
Gemini program, he achieved the first
space rendezvous,
station-keeping his
Gemini 6A spacecraft within 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.