Last surviving Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham dead at 90

Walter Cunningham, the last surviving astronaut from the first successful manned space mission in NASA’s Apollo program, died Tuesday in Houston. He is 90 years old.

NASA confirmed Cunningham’s death in a statement but did not include a cause. A spokeswoman for the agency and Cunningham’s wife, Dot Cunningham, did not immediately respond to questions.

Cunningham was one of three astronauts on the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, an 11-day space flight that broadcast live television broadcasts as it orbited Earth, paving the way for the moon landings less than a year later.

Cunningham, then a civilian, led the mission with Navy Capt. Walter M. Schirra and Donn F. Eisele, an Air Force major.

Cunningham was the pilot of the lunar module on the spacecraft, which was launched from the Cape Kennedy Air Force Station, Florida, on October 11 and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda.

Emmy-winning crew

NASA says Cunningham, Eisele and Schirra flew a perfect mission. The spacecraft performed so well that the agency sent the next crew, Apollo 8, to orbit the moon as a prelude to the Apollo 11 landing in July 1969.

Apollo 7 astronauts also won a special Emmy award for their daily television reports from orbit, as they orbited, held funny signs and educated earthlings about space flight.

It was NASA’s first manned space mission after the deaths of three Apollo 1 astronauts in a launch fire on January 27, 1967.

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

Dream of flying

Cunningham was born in Creston, Iowa, and attended high school in California before enlisting in the Navy in 1951 and serving in the Marine Corps. pilot in Korea, according to NASA.

He later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the University of California at Los Angeles, where he also did doctoral studies, and worked as a scientist at the Rand Corporation before joining NASA.

In an interview the year before his death, Cunningham recalled growing up poor and dreaming of airplanes, not spaceships.

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

After retiring from NASA in 1971, Cunningham worked in engineering, business and investment, and became a public speaker and radio host. He wrote a memoir about his career and time as an astronaut, The All-American Boys.

He has also expressed skepticism in recent years about human activity contributing to climate change, contradicting the scientific consensus in his writings and public lectures, while admitting that he is not a climate scientist.

Although Cunningham never flew another space mission after Apollo 7, he remained a strong supporter of space exploration. He told a Spokane, Wash., paper last year, “I think that humans need to continue to expand and push the level that they can live in space.”

Cunningham is survived by his wife, Dot, sister, Cathy Cunningham, and children, Brian and Kimberly.