PULLING WITH AN EVEN STRAIN. Wally Schirra, 1923-2007.

He was the only astronaut to fly in all three of NASA's original manned spaceflight programs: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Although he never walked on the moon, Schirra laid some of the groundwork that made the lunar landings possible and won the space race for the United States.

Note in the mission patch that the "sigma" in Sigma-7 is the uppercase summation sign, not the lower case symbol for standard deviation. One history of Project Mercury gives as Commander Schirra's reason for that callsign an indication of a desire to conduct a precise flight, that after Aurora-7 splashed down just a little bit outside its planned landing zone.

Commander Schirra had his own domain name, complete with a Star Wars-inspired trailer.