Walter Cunningham, the last surviving astronaut from the Apollo 7 mission, has died at the age of 90. His 1968 spaceflight with two other astronauts helped pave the way for the moon landing less than a year later.
Cunningham recalled Apollo 7 during a 2017 event at 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 high school in California before enlisting with the Navy in 1951 and serving as a Marine Corps. pilot in Korea, according to NASA. He later obtained 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 scientist for the Rand Corporation before joining NASA.
In an interview the year before his death, Cunningham recalled growing up poor and dreaming of flying airplanes, not spacecraft.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.
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, his sister Cathy Cunningham, and his children Brian and Kimberly.
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