Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham dead at 90

Walter Cunningham, the final surviving astronaut from the primary profitable crewed space mission in NASA’s Apollo program, has died. He was 90.

NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs confirmed Cunningham’s demise to The Related Press however didn’t instantly present additional particulars. Cunningham’s spouse, Dot Cunningham, stated in a press release that he died Tuesday however didn’t say the place or present a explanation for demise.

Cunningham was one in every of three astronauts aboard the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, an 11-day spaceflight that beamed dwell tv broadcasts as they orbited Earth, paving the best way for the moon landing lower than a yr later.

Cunningham, then a civilian, crewed the mission with Navy Capt. Walter M. Schirra and Donn F. Eisele, an Air Drive main. Cunningham was the lunar module pilot on the space flight, which launched from Cape Kennedy Air Drive Station, Florida, on Oct. 11 and splashed down within the Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda.

NASA stated Cunningham, Eisele and Schirra’ flew a close to good mission. Their spacecraft carried out so properly that the company despatched the subsequent crew, Apollo 8, to orbit the moon as a prelude to the Apollo 11 moon touchdown in July 1969.

The Apollo 7 astronauts additionally gained a particular Emmy award for his or her day by day tv experiences from orbit, throughout which they clowned round, held up humorous indicators and educated earthlings about space flight.

It was NASA’s first crewed space mission for the reason that deaths of the three Apollo 1 astronauts in a launch pad hearth Jan. 27, 1967.

Cunningham recalled Apollo 7 throughout a 2017 occasion on the Kennedy Area Middle, saying it “enabled us to beat all of the obstacles we had after the Apollo 1 hearth and it turned the longest, most profitable check flight of any flying machine ever.”

Cunningham was born in Creston, Iowa, and attended high school in California earlier than enlisting with the Navy in 1951 and serving as a Marine Corps. pilot in Korea, based on NASA. He later obtained bachelor’s and grasp’s levels in physics from the College of California at Los Angeles, the place he additionally did doctoral research, and labored as scientist for the Rand Company earlier than becoming a member of NASA.

In an interview the yr earlier than his demise, Cunningham recalled rising up poor and dreaming of flying airplanes, not spacecraft.

“We by no means even knew that there have been astronauts after I was rising up,” Cunningham advised The Spokesman-Review.

After NASA, Cunningham went on to work in engineering, enterprise and investing, and have become a public speaker and radio host. He wrote a memoir about his profession and time as an astronaut, “The All-American Boys.”

Though Cunningham by no means crewed one other space mission after Apollo 7, he remained a proponent of space exploration. He advised the Spokane, Washington, paper final yr, “I believe that people must proceed increasing and pushing out the degrees at which they’re surviving in space.”

Cunningham is survived by his spouse, his sister Cathy Cunningham, and his kids Brian and Kimberly.

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