Last surviving Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham dead at 90 | 24CA News

Walter Cunningham, the final surviving astronaut from the primary profitable crewed house mission in NASA’s Apollo program, died on Tuesday in Houston. He was 90.

NASA confirmed Cunningham’s dying in an announcement however didn’t embody the trigger. His household stated by means of a spokesperson, Jeff Carr, that Cunningham died in a hospital “from complications of a fall, after a full and complete life.”

Cunningham was considered one of three astronauts aboard the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, an 11-day house flight that beamed dwell tv broadcasts as they orbited Earth, paving the best way for the moon touchdown 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 Force main.

Cunningham was the lunar module pilot on the house flight, which launched from Cape Kennedy Air Force Station, Florida, on Oct. 11 and splashed down within the Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda.

Emmy-winning crew

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 studies from orbit, throughout which they clowned round, held up humorous indicators and educated earthlings about house flight.

It was NASA’s first crewed house mission after the deaths of the three Apollo 1 astronauts in a launch pad fireplace on Jan. 27, 1967.

Cunningham recalled Apollo 7 throughout a 2017 occasion on the Kennedy Space Center, saying it “enabled us to overcome all the obstacles we had after the Apollo 1 fire and it became the longest, most successful test flight of any flying machine ever.”

Dreamed of flying planes

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 line with NASA.

He later obtained bachelor’s and grasp’s levels in physics from the University of California at Los Angeles, the place he additionally did doctoral research, and labored as scientist for the Rand Corporation earlier than becoming a member of NASA.

In an interview the 12 months earlier than his dying, Cunningham recalled rising up poor and dreaming of flying airplanes, not spacecraft.

“We never even knew that there were astronauts when I was growing up,” Cunningham instructed The Spokesman-Review.

After retiring from NASA in 1971, Cunningham labored in engineering, business 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.

Although Cunningham by no means crewed one other house mission after Apollo 7, he remained a proponent of house exploration. He instructed the Spokane, Wash., paper final 12 months, “I think that humans need to continue expanding and pushing out the levels at which they’re surviving in space.”

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