High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Mercury-Atlas 8 (MA-8) was an early manned space mission, part of NASA`s Mercury program. Astronaut Walter M. Schirra, Jr., orbited the Earth six times in the Sigma 7 spacecraft on October 3, 1962, in a nine-hour flight focused mainly on technical evaluation rather than on scientific experimentation. This was the longest American orbital flight yet achieved in the Space Race, though well behind the several-day record set by the Soviet Vostok 3 earlier in the year. It confirmed the Mercury spacecraft`s durability ahead of the one-day Mercury-Atlas 9 mission that followed in 1963.