Last surviving Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham dies at 90

Walter Cunningham, the final surviving astronaut from the primary profitable crewed house mission in NASA’s Apollo programme, has died in Houston on the age of 90.

NASA confirmed former astronaut Walter Cunningham, who flew to house aboard Apollo 7 in 1968, a part of the primary crewed Apollo mission paving the way in which for 12 others to land on the moon in subsequent years, died on Tuesday at age 90, NASA didn’t embody the reason for dying within the assertion on Tuesday.

His household mentioned by way of a spokesperson, Jeff Carr, that Cunningham “died in the hospital of natural causes.”

Cunningham was certainly one of three astronauts aboard the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, an 11-day spaceflight that beamed reside TV broadcasts as they orbited Earth, paving the way in which for the Moon touchdown lower than a 12 months later.

Cunningham, then a civilian, crewed the mission with Navy Captain 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 October 11 and splashed down within the Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda.

NASA mentioned Cunningham, Eisele and Schirra flew a near-perfect mission. 

Their spacecraft carried out so nicely 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 Bill Nelson mentioned on Tuesday that Cunningham was “above all” an explorer whose work additionally laid the inspiration for the company’s new Artemis Moon programme.

The Apollo 7 astronauts additionally gained 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 house flight.

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

Life, profession

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.”

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 accordance with NASA.

He later obtained bachelor’s and grasp’s levels in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, the place he additionally did doctoral research, and labored as a 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 advised 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.”

Climate disaster skeptic 

He additionally expressed skepticism in his later years about human exercise contributing to local weather disaster, 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 advised the Spokane, Washington, 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 Dorothy, his sister Cathy Cunningham, and his youngsters Brian and Kimberly.

In a press release, Cunningham’s household mentioned, “The world has lost another true hero, and we will miss him dearly.”

Source: AP