Daily Inspiration Quote by Wally Schirra

Schirra’s line has the clipped impatience of a test pilot who’s tired of rehearsal and wants the real flight plan. It isn’t anti-Moon romance so much as anti-bureaucracy: a refusal to let a familiar destination become an institutional comfort blanket. “I don’t go along with” is tellingly plainspoken, the language of dissent inside a consensus-driven machine. He’s arguing against a certain kind of programmatic creep, where intermediate steps quietly become the mission, budgets metastasize, and “preparation” turns into an excuse to postpone risk.

The subtext is also territorial. By the time people start proposing a lunar “launch pad” for Mars, the space program has shifted from the astronaut’s cockpit logic (do what works, minimize moving parts) to an infrastructure logic (build outposts, justify supply chains, create permanence). Schirra’s counterproposal - Mars from Earth orbit - is a purity test for purpose: if Mars is the goal, stop building symbolic waystations that satisfy politics and public relations more than physics.

Context matters: Schirra was one of the original Mercury Seven, an era when NASA sold clarity and urgency, not multi-decade architectures. His “we’ve already practiced” nods to Apollo as proof of competence, but it also reads like a warning about nostalgia masquerading as strategy. The line lands because it pits two American fantasies against each other: the frontier outpost versus the direct shot. Schirra, ever the operator, votes for the burn that counts.