04/02/2026
TBT - Ken Caryl style - Artemis II, Astronauts, Actifed and Awesomeness....🌏🪐💥🤧 Did you watch the Artemis II launch yesterday? One of the first residents in the Ken Caryl West Ranch, a group of 52 exclusive homesites developed in the early 80's, was Wally Schirra, one of the original American astronauts. His story is really fascinating, and he was quite a rebel! Schirra was the first person to fly in space three times and conducted the first live television pictures publicly broadcast from inside a crewed spacecraft.
Fun fact:
During one mission, Schirra became sick with a head cold, which he passed to crewmates. Anticipating issues with congestion inside of a sealed spacesuit, Schirra proposed to Mission Control that they would not wear their helmets during reentry. Despite a request from mission control to wear helmets during reentry, Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham refused and performed reentry without them. Apollo 7 landed southeast of Bermuda on October 22, 1968, just fine with no helmets.
A combination of pseudoephedrine decongestant with triprolidine antihistamine was the cold medicine carried on board the Apollo missions and prescribed by the flight surgeon. Years later when this became available over the counter as Actifed, the makers of Actifed hired Schirra as a television commercial spokesman, based on the notoriety of his Apollo 7 in-space head cold.
His post-retirement resume is very extensive. He served as a consultant to CBS News from 1969 to 1975, and joined Walter Cronkite to co-anchor the network's coverage of the seven Moon landing missions, starting with Apollo 11 and including the ill-fated Apollo 13, He was a member of an advisory board for U.S. National Parks in the Department of the Interior, worked for the Belgian Consulate for Colorado and New Mexico, from 1971 to 1984, and was a board member of several corporations including Johns-Manville Corporation.(hence his Ken Caryl connection) and was president of the energy development company Prometheus from 1980 to 1981 and authored several books. Wow! We have had (and still do have) so many interesting people who live in Ken Caryl, right? 👏
Schell Real Estate - Living and loving Ken Caryl history
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