Abstract
Following repairs in September to a leak in the Atlas rocket’s fuel tank and a further five-day delay caused by a faulty valve in Sigma 7’s reaction control system, Schirra’s flight was listed on the Atlantic Missile Range schedule for 3 October 1962. Launch time was set between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. (EST) to provide for at least three hours of daylight search time in the six-orbit recovery area, located some 275 miles northeast of Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean.
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REFERENCES
Richard E. Day and John J. Van Bockel, report, “Pilot Performance,” taken from Results of the Third United States Manned Orbital Space Flight, October 3, 1962, NASA SP-12, Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, TX, December 1962
Alan Rochford email correspondence with Colin Burgess, 22 July 2015
Ibid
Jules Bergman, article “From Sputnik to Star Trek,” Flying magazine, issue September 1977, pg. 318
Walter M. Schirra, Jr. with Richard N. Billings, Schirra’s Space, Quinlan Press, Boston, MA, 1988
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Alan Rochford interviewed by Summer Chick Bergen for NASA JSC Oral History program, Houston, TX, 15 September 1998
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Alan Rochford interviewed by Summer Chick Bergen for NASA JSC Oral History program, Houston, TX, 15 September 1998
Walter Schirra, “Pilot’s Flight Report,” from Results of the Third United States Manned Orbital Space Flight, October 3, 1962, (NASA SP-12), Office of Scientific and Technical Information, NASA, Washington, DC, December 1962
John Dille, “At the End of a Great Flight, Big Bull’s-Eye,” Life magazine, issue 12 October 1962, pg. 51
Walter M. Schirra, Jr. with Richard N. Billings, Schirra’s Space, Quinlan Press, Boston, MA, 1988, pg. 85
Walter M. Schirra, Jr., “Astronaut’s Self-Debriefing,” taken from Postlaunch Memorandum Report for Mercury-Atlas No. 8 (MA-8), NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, TX, 23 October 1962
Francis French email correspondence with Colin Burgess, 24 October 2015
Walter M. Schirra, Jr., “Pilot’s Flight Report,” from Results of the Third U.S. Manned Orbital Space Flight, October 3, 1962, NASA SP-12, Manned Spacecraft center, Houston, TX, December 1962
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Burgess, C. (2016). Sigma 7 flies. In: Sigma 7. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27983-1_4
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