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 loss of life 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 reason behind loss of life.

Cunningham was considered one of three astronauts aboard the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, an 11-day spaceflight that beamed dwell tv broadcasts as they orbited Earth, paving the way in which for the moon landing lower than a 12 months later.

Cunningham, then a civilian, crewed the mission with Navy Capt. Walter M. Schirra and Donn F. Eisele, an Air Pressure main. Cunningham was the lunar module pilot on the space flight, which launched from Cape Kennedy Air Pressure 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 received a particular Emmy award for his or her every day tv studies 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 House Middle, saying it “enabled us to beat all of the obstacles we had after the Apollo 1 hearth and it grew to become 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, in line with 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 12 months earlier than his loss of life, Cunningham recalled rising up poor and dreaming of flying airplanes, not spacecraft.

“We by no means even knew that there have been astronauts once I was rising up,” Cunningham instructed 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 instructed the Spokane, Washington, paper final 12 months, “I feel that people have to 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 youngsters Brian and Kimberly.

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