Space pioneer Wally Schirra dies at 84

By Jeff Franks and Erwin Seba

HOUSTON (Reuters) - U.S. space pioneer Wally Schirra, who helped lead America into the space age as one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, has died at the age of 84, NASA said on Thursday.

Schirra had a heart attack and died early on Thursday at a hospital near his home in Rancho Santa Fe, California, said Ruth Varonfakis, a friend and spokeswoman for the San Diego Air & Space Museum, where Schirra was on the board.

She said he had cancer, but that his family asked her not to discuss it. NASA said he had died on Wednesday night.

Schirra and his Mercury 7 colleagues captured the nation's imagination as they flew NASA's earliest flights in the Cold War space race with the Soviet Union.

NASA promoted them as all-American heroes with the "right stuff" to go into the unexplored darkness of space aboard still-experimental rockets.

Schirra, the only astronaut to fly on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights, was the third American into space when he orbited Earth six times in an October 1962 Mercury flight.

In December 1965, he and Thomas Stafford flew on Gemini 6, which included a space rendezvous with Gemini 7.

Schirra never got to the moon, but his Apollo 7 mission in October 1968 paved the way for the subsequent moon missions.