Walt Cunningham, final surviving member of Apollo 7—the primary manned orbital voyage of Challenge Apollo—died on Tuesday, 3 January. He was 90.
“Walt Cunningham was a fighter pilot, physicist and an entrepreneur, however above all, he was an explorer,” stated NASA Administrator Invoice Nelson. “On Apollo 7, the primary launch of a crewed Apollo mission, Walt and his crewmates made historical past, paving the best way for the Artemis Technology we see at the moment.”
Ronnie Walter Cunningham was born on 16 March 1932 in Creston, Iowa, and regardless of a navy background got here to be seen—a tad derogatively—as one in all “the scientists” of NASA’s early Astronaut Corps, owing to his spectacular credentials as a civilian physicist. He earned bachelor’s and grasp’s levels from the College of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1960 and 1961, then commenced doctoral analysis, which he accomplished, other than his ultimate thesis.
By this stage, nonetheless, he had additionally served within the navy. Cunningham joined the U.S. Navy in 1951 and commenced flight coaching while on energetic responsibility, then transitioned to order standing with the U.S. Marine Corps. His rationale: within the Navy, pilots ran the danger of getting themselves assigned to torpedo bombers or heavy transport plane, while the Marines assured him a spot flying rather more glamorous single-engine fighters.
Earlier than his choice by NASA in October 1963, Cunningham labored for the RAND Corp., performing analysis in assist of categorized applications and magnetospheric physics. “I used to be engaged on protection in opposition to submarine-launched ballistic missiles, attempting to write down in…the crudest style the equations that will intercept a missile on the rise,” he stated later.
“On the similar time, I used to be doing my doctoral work on the Earth’s magnetosphere,” Cunningham added. “It was a triaxial search coil magnetometer and we had been attempting to measure fluctuations within the Earth’s magnetic subject.
“It was throughout this era that I utilized and obtained accepted at NASA,” Cunningham continued. “I by no means did end the thesis.”
With a self-confessed air of academia and irreverence to authority, Cunningham stood out among the many 14 newbies chosen as NASA’s third class of astronauts in October 1963, whose ranks included future Moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin, Dave Scott and Gene Cernan. In September 1966, he was assigned with astronauts Wally Schirra and Donn Eisele to Apollo 2, the second manned mission of this system, which NASA described as “an open-end, Earth-orbital mission of as much as 14 days”.
In its unique incarnation, Apollo 2 was a digital repeat of the Apollo 1 check flight—utilizing the first-generation “Block 1” Command and Service Module (CSM)—which astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee had been anticipated to fly someday within the first quarter of 1967. However Schirra deemed it mindless to repeat a mission already flown and by mid-November 1966 Apollo 2 was formally deleted from the flight manifest.
As an alternative, Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham had been assigned as backups to Apollo 1, with no agency mission of their very own on the horizon. However all that modified on the dreadful evening of 27 January 1967, when Grissom, White and Chaffee had been killed as a fireplace swept by means of their Block 1 CSM throughout a “plugs-out” communications check atop their Saturn IB launch automobile on Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy, Fla.
The tragic outcome was that by the late spring of 1967, as NASA and its contractor groups started the laboriously tough technique of rebuilding shattered desires and creating an Apollo spacecraft that would sometime attain the Moon, Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham—in a way none of them might ever have wished or wished—had been assigned to Apollo 7, the primary crewed mission of this system, focused for late the next 12 months. Their project was introduced earlier than Congress on 9 Might by NASA Administrator Jim Webb.
Early on 11 October 1968, the three males boarded Apollo 7 for an uneventful countdown, interrupted solely briefly when the ventilator in Cunningham’s house swimsuit acted up and commenced dropping strain; the ventilator was swapped for a spare with no additional incident. Standing on Pad 34’s swing-arm, earlier than ingressing the spacecraft, he had probability to have a look at the large Saturn IB.
“It was fairly windy now,” Cunningham wrote in his memoir, The All-American Boys. “Beneath us, we might really feel the automobile and swing-arm sway.”
Apollo 7 took flight at 11:02 a.m. EDT, the Saturn IB’s eight H-1 first-stage engines punching out 1.6 million kilos (725,000 kilograms) of thrust, all beneath the watchful gaze of an estimated half-million spectators and 600 accredited journalists crowded alongside Florida’s roadways and seashores.
Cunningham’s first view of the Dwelling Planet from house—a beautiful sweeping vista of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula—was electrifying. “Simply because it had appeared in drawings of the latest Arab-Israeli Battle, with the Suez Canal and the Purple Sea on one aspect and the Gulf of Aqaba on the opposite,” he later wrote. “Right here I used to be, trying on the globe because it actually was.”
Apollo 7 would final simply shy of 11 days, making it the United States’ second-longest manned space mission in history at that time. Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham carried out rendezvous exams with the S-IVB ultimate stage of their launch automobile—simply as future crews would do when selecting up their Lunar Module (LM)—and efficiently test-fired the massive Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine on the base of the Service Module.
The trio additionally turned sudden media sensations, due to the “Wally, Walt and Donn Reveals”, their common telecasts from house—“from the stunning Apollo room, excessive above the whole lot”—which later received them a particular Emmy Award. However the astronauts additionally fell foul to extreme head-colds, which reportedly precipitated irritation and a measure of friction with the personnel in Mission Management. By splashdown day, 22 October, their colds had been so unhealthy that Schirra refused to put on helmets throughout descent.
Many observers have ascribed this “insubordination” and recognized the crew’s motion as a pivotal consider stopping Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham from flying once more. Certainly, the previous pair retired from NASA shortly after the mission, however Cunningham remained, later heading up the Skylab Department of the Astronaut Workplace.
Throughout this time, he labored extensively on the transition of America’s first house station from a “moist workshop”, using a passivated rocket stage as a makeshift orbital dwelling and laboratory, right into a “dry workshop”, absolutely constructed and outfitted on the bottom. However Cunningham had, it appeared, been “tarred and feathered” within the minds of many senior flight administrators (together with Chris Kraft) after Apollo 7, and when it turned clear that he wouldn’t get a Skylab flight project he left NASA in August 1971.
Within the aftermath of his astronaut profession, Cunningham led a number of technical and monetary organizations, serving in key management roles with Century Improvement Corp., Hydrotech Improvement Firm and 3D Worldwide. He was additionally an investor and entrepreneur and a frequent keynote speaker and radio discuss present host.
“We wish to categorical our immense satisfaction within the life that he lived, and our deep gratitude for the person that he was—a patriot, an explorer, pilot, astronaut, husband, brother and father,” stated the Cunningham household in an announcement. “The world has misplaced one other true hero and we’ll miss him dearly.”
