Walter Cunningham, the last surviving astronaut from the first successful crewed space mission in NASA’s Apollo program, died Tuesday in Houston. He was 90.
NASA confirmed Cunningham’s death in a statement but did not include its cause. His family said through a spokesman, Jeff Carr, that Cunningham died in a hospital “from complications of a fall, after a full and complete life.”
Walter Cunningham was one of three astronauts aboard the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, an 11-day spaceflight that beamed live television broadcasts as they orbited Earth, paving the way for the moon landing less than a year later.
Walter Cunningham, then a civilian, crewed the mission with Navy Capt. Walter M. Schirra and Donn F. Eisele, an Air Force major. Cunningham was the lunar module pilot on the space flight, which launched from Cape Kennedy Air Force Station, Florida, on Oct. 11 and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda.
NASA said Walter Cunningham, Eisele and Schirra’ flew a near perfect mission. Their spacecraft performed so well that the agency sent the next crew, Apollo 8, to orbit the moon as a prelude to the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday that Cunningham was “above all” an explorer whose work also laid the foundation for the agency’s new Artemis moon program.
In an interview the year before his death, Cunningham recalled growing up poor and dreaming of flying airplanes, not spacecraft.
“We never even knew that 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 investing, 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 also expressed skepticism in his later years about human activity contributing to climate change, bucking the scientific consensus in writing and public talks, while acknowledging that he was not a climate scientist.
Although Cunningham never crewed another space mission after Apollo 7, he remained a proponent of space exploration. He told the Spokane, Washington, paper last year, “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 wife Dot, his sister Cathy Cunningham, and his children Brian and Kimberly. In a statement, Cunningham’s family said, “the world has lost another true hero, and we will miss him dearly.”
(AP)