Walter Cunningham, the final surviving astronaut from the primary profitable crewed area mission in NASA’s Apollo program, died Tuesday in Houston. He was 90.
NASA confirmed Cunningham’s dying in an announcement however didn’t embrace its trigger. His household stated via a spokesman, Jeff Carr, that Cunningham died in a hospital “from issues of a fall, after a full and full life.”
Cunningham was one in all three astronauts aboard the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, an 11-day spaceflight that beamed reside tv broadcasts as they orbited Earth, paving the best way for the moon touchdown 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 area 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.
NASA Administrator Invoice Nelson stated Tuesday that Cunningham was “above all” an explorer whose work additionally laid the inspiration for the company’s new Artemis moon program.
The Apollo 7 astronauts additionally gained a particular Emmy award for his or her every day tv reviews from orbit, throughout which they clowned round, held up humorous indicators and educated earthlings about area flight.
It was NASA’s first crewed area mission because the 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 highschool in California earlier than enlisting with the Navy in 1951 and serving as a Marine Corps pilot in Korea, in keeping 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 yr earlier than his dying, 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 instructed The Spokesman-Assessment.
After retiring from NASA in 1971, Cunningham labored 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.” He additionally expressed skepticism in his later years about human exercise contributing to local weather change, bucking the scientific consensus in writing and public talks, whereas acknowledging that he was not a local weather scientist.
Though Cunningham by no means crewed one other area mission after Apollo 7, he remained a proponent of area exploration. He instructed the Spokane, Washington, paper final yr, “I believe that people have to proceed increasing and pushing out the degrees at which they’re surviving in area.”
Cunningham is survived by his spouse Dot, his sister Cathy Cunningham, and his youngsters Brian and Kimberly. In an announcement, Cunningham’s household stated, “the world has misplaced one other true hero, and we’ll miss him dearly.”
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