Walter Cunningham, the only astronaut still alive from the first successful manned space mission in NASA’s Apollo program, passed away Tuesday at the age of 90. This is reported by various American media.
Cunningham was one of three astronauts aboard the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, an eleven-day spaceflight that broadcast live television images as the spacecraft orbited the Earth, paving the way for the moon landing less than a year later. The Apollo 7 astronauts even won an Emmy Award for their daily TV reports from space, in which they cracked jokes, held up humorous signs, and taught Earthlings about spaceflight.
Apollo 7 was NASA’s first crewed space mission since the deaths of the three Apollo 1 astronauts in a fire on the launch pad in January 1967. Cunningham crewed the Apollo 7 mission with Navy Captain Walter Schirra and Air Force Major Donn Eisele. Their spacecraft performed so well that NASA sent the next crew, Apollo 8, to the moon as a prelude to the historic Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969.
In an interview a year before his death, Cunningham recalled growing up poor and dreaming of airplanes, not spacecraft. “We didn’t even know there were astronauts when I was growing up,” he said The Spokesman Review. Although Cunningham would never again crew a space mission after Apollo 7, he remained an advocate of space exploration. “I think people should continue to strive for higher levels of survival in space.”
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