Walter Cunningham, the last living astronaut on the first successful Apollo manned space mission, has died. He was 90 years old.
US space agency spokesman Bob Jacobs confirmed Guard Cunningham’s death, however, did not elaborate. Cunningham’s wife, Dot Cunningham, said her husband passed away on Tuesday, but did not disclose the cause of death.
Cunningham was one of three astronauts on the Apollo 7 mission in 1968. It was an 11-day flight with live broadcasts from orbit. The mission laid the groundwork for a moon landing in less than a year.
Cunningham worked with US Navy Captain Walter M. Schirra and Major Donn F. Eisele.
Cunningham was a lunar module pilot on a space flight that took off from Cape Kennedy Air Force Base in Florida on October 11 and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda.
NASA said Cunningham, Eisele, and Schirra completed their missions almost perfectly. The spacecraft performed so well that the agency sent the next crew on the Apollo 8 mission to orbit the moon as a preparatory step for landing on the moon. Apollo 11 landed humans on the Earth satellite in July 1969.
The Apollo 7 astronauts received a special Emmy Award for their daily television reports of playing from orbit, showing humorous signs, and educating earthlings about spaceflight.
This was NASA’s first manned space mission since the death of three Apollo 1 astronauts in a launch pad fire on January 27, 1967.
Born in Creston, Iowa, Cunningham attended high school in California before joining the Navy in 1951. He served as a Marine Corps pilot in Korea.
In addition, the future astronaut received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Cunningham recalled in an interview he gave the year before his death that he grew up in poverty and dreamed of flying airplanes instead of spaceships.
“When I was growing up, we didn’t even know there were astronauts,” Cunningham told Spokesperson-Review.
Since his career at NASA, Cunningham has worked in engineering, business and investment, and is also a speaker and radio host. He wrote a memoir about his career in the book All American Boys.
He said in an interview last year: “I think people need to continue to expand their activities in space and go beyond the levels they are at now.”
Cunningham is survived by his wife, sister Kathy Cunningham, and their children Brian and Kimberly.