Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham dies at 90 | Engadget

Walter Cunningham, an astronaut who was the final surviving member of the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, died on Tuesday at 90. The Iowa-born Cunningham served within the US Navy and Marine Corps earlier than becoming a member of NASA in 1963 and ultimately participating within the Apollo program’s first crewed (and first televised) flight.

NASA confirmed Cunningham’s loss of life and added that he was “instrumental to our Moon touchdown’s program success.” According to the Houston Chronicle, Cunningham died in an area hospital of issues from a fall.

Apollo 7 was NASA’s first spaceflight after the 1967 Apollo 1 tragedy, the place a hearth killed three astronauts throughout a rehearsal check. This led to a longer-than-usual coaching interval, as NASA shelved human-crewed spaceflight for 21 months following Apollo 1. The crew spent many lengthy hours learning the spacecraft’s design and building of the Apollo command and repair modules (CSM) to assist keep away from a repeat tragedy, which might have been perilous for the astronauts and this system. Finally, the crew splashed down on Earth on October 22, 1968, after almost 11 days in house. Apollo 7 additional examined NASA’s gear and helped pave the best way for Apollo 11, the place the primary people walked on the moon.

Cunningham retired from NASA in 1971 and tried his hand at public talking, radio internet hosting, offshore engineering, business actual property and enterprise capital investing. Unfortunately, he additionally turned an outspoken local weather change denier. Speaking to Forbes in 2013, Cunningham went by way of a laundry checklist of fossil-fuel trade speaking factors, framing trendy NASA as a company managed by the media whereas claiming climate-change science was nearer to demagoguery than truth. (For the file, local weather change is actual, and we’re operating out of time to keep away from disaster.)

“I definitely believe that we lived in the good old days,” Cunningham stated in a 1999 NASA interview. “We lived in the golden age of manned spaceflight. We’ve been in space now for over 40 years. The first 40 years of aviation, we went from just barely flying to jet transport, you know. And now, we haven’t moved that far since we went into space. The days through Apollo will be remembered; there’ll never be another time like that again. Even when we go to Mars, it will be different. And I feel just fortunate that I was a small part of this particular time in spaceflight.”