Post-flight
The post-flight analysis reported no major malfunctions—the only troublesome anomaly being the suit temperature controls— and all the engineering objectives of the mission were deemed successfully completed. The fuel-conservation measures were found to have worked particularly well, with even less fuel than anticipated being consumed; despite the technical changes, the official report gave full credit for this to the pilot. The medical analysis found no significant physiological effects from nine hours of weightlessness, and noted that Schirra had received no significant radiation exposure. Analysis of the radiation-sensitive plates confirmed that there had been a very low radioactive flux inside the spacecraft, and the six ablative materials tested were all deemed broadly satisfactory despite some difficulty comparing them to each other.
Scientifically, the light-observation experiments were unsuccessful, as both target locations were covered by thick cloud cover. However, Schirra was able to view lightning near Woomera, and noted the lights of a city a few hundred miles from Durban. The filtered photography for the Weather Bureau worked as planned, with 15 photographs taken; the conventional color photography was less successful, with several of the 14 photographs unusable due to overexposure or excess cloud cover. In the end, the conventional photographs were not used for scientific examination due to these problems. Schirra noted that the sheer amount of cloud coverage, worldwide, could provide problems for future activity of this kind; however, Africa, and the south-western United States, were perfectly clear.
Schirra's post-flight report noted the "fireflies" seen on the previous two missions, and emphasized the remarkable visual effect of the thick band of the atmosphere visible around the horizon. However, he was unimpressed with the view of Earth from space; the amount of detail he could make out compared well with that from high-flying aircraft, and he told debriefers that it was "nothing new" compared to flight at 50,000 feet (15,000 m). Overall, he concluded that Sigma 7 was on "the top of the list" of aircraft he had flown, displacing the F8F Bearcat, a naval piston-engined fighter, while the mission itself had been "textbook".
Schirra gave a public lecture at Rice University after returning to Houston, where he received a motorcade through the city. However, the Cuban Missile Crisis had been steadily escalating through September, and helped drive discussion of Schirra's successful flight down the news schedules; public concern about the relative effectiveness of Soviet and American space launchers was displaced by a more pressing concern over Soviet military rockets. He visited Washington, D.C., to receive the NASA Distinguished Service Medal from President Kennedy on October 16, the same day Kennedy had first seen U-2 photographs of missile sites in Cuba; the meeting was friendly and informal despite the circumstances. Robert Kennedy, Schirra later noted, took him aside and sounded him out about a potential political career, the same way he had sounded out John Glenn a year earlier. Unlike Glenn, however, Schirra politely turned the suggestion down, and chose to remain with NASA. His later career saw him commanding the backup crew for the first Gemini mission, then the prime crew for the 1965 Gemini 6A mission, where he flew the first active rendezvous between two spacecraft - earlier plans for it to conduct the first on-orbit docking had been cancelled - and finally commanding the first Apollo mission, Apollo 7, in 1968. He eventually resigned from NASA in the summer of 1969.
The success of MA-8 made the preparation for MA-9 "considerably easier", though it did cause some observers to suggest the program should be ended abruptly in order to conclude on a clear note of success, rather than risking another—potentially catastrophic—flight. However, this was not a view shared by the NASA planners, who had been pressing for a one-day Mercury mission since mid-1961, when it first began to seem technically feasible. To prepare the spacecraft for a long-duration mission involved trimming as much on-board weight as possible to offset the additional consumables required. The changes made to the capsule hardware on MA-8 were now used to justify the removal of 12 pounds (5.4 kg) of control equipment and 5 pounds (2.3 kg) of radio equipment, as well as the 76 pounds (34 kg) periscope which Schirra had found so unhelpful. In total, there were 183 alterations listed between the capsules for the MA-8 and MA-9 missions. The spacecraft was to be equipped with several cameras, building on Schirra's photographic work, though weight and power limitations did restrict the amount of scientific experiments that could be scheduled.
Read more about this topic: Mercury-Atlas 8