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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 embody its trigger. His household mentioned by means of a spokesman, Jeff Carr, that Cunningham died in a hospital “from issues of a fall, after a full and full life.”
Cunningham was considered 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 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 Power main. Cunningham was the lunar module pilot on the area flight, which launched from Cape Kennedy Air Power Station, Florida, on Oct. 11 and splashed down within the Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda.
NASA mentioned Cunningham, Eisele and Schirra’ flew a close to excellent 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 Invoice Nelson mentioned Tuesday that Cunningham was “above all” an explorer whose work additionally laid the muse for the company’s new Artemis moon program.
The Apollo 7 astronauts additionally received a particular Emmy award for his or her day by day tv stories 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 for the reason that 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 Heart, 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 12 months 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 once I was rising up,” Cunningham informed The Spokesman-Overview.
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 informed the Spokane, Washington, paper final 12 months, “I believe that people must 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 mentioned, “the world has misplaced one other true hero, and we are going to miss him dearly.”
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