Walter Cunningham, who helped pave the way to the moon

By Richard Goldstein

Walter Cunningham, a civilian astronaut whose only mission in space, aboard Apollo 7, revived NASA’s quest to put men on the moon in the wake of a landing-pad fire that killed three astronauts, died on Tuesday in Houston. He was 90.

His death was announced by NASA.

Cunningham, a physicist and a former Marine pilot, joined Capt. Walter M. Schirra Jr. of the Navy and Maj. Donn F. Eisele of the Air Force on a virtually flawless 11-day mission in October 1968. They completed 163 orbits of the Earth (4.5 million miles) in a reconstructed space capsule with many safety modifications and became the first NASA astronauts to appear on television from space.

The flight — the first manned Apollo mission — buoyed an America shocked by the capsule fire that took the lives of Virgil I. Grissom, Roger B. Chaffee and Edward H. White II as they rehearsed for an envisioned Apollo 1 mission at Cape Kennedy, Florida, in January 1967.

“We carried the nation’s hope with us,” Cunningham wrote in his memoir, “The All-American Boys” (1977). “Twenty-one months before, a fire on the very pad from which we launched had killed three of our teammates. One more setback now, and the prospects of landing a man on the moon before 1970 would be gone forever.”

“The task wasn’t only technical,” he added. “We also had to address any psychological barriers that still remained.”

Cunningham, a lean figure with a brush cut, seemed to fit the astronaut archetype. But unlike many of the other early astronauts, he had never been a test pilot. His selection by NASA reflected the agency’s increasing interest in recruiting astronauts with scientific expertise. He was the second civilian in space, after Neil Armstrong, who had flown in the Gemini program and later became the first man to walk on the moon.

Cunningham monitored the Apollo 7 flight systems, alongside Schirra, the command pilot, and Eisele, the navigator.

Apollo 7 — which blasted off on Oct. 11, 1968, following unmanned Apollo flights in the wake of the disastrous fire — passed its maneuverability and reliability tests. The capsule rendezvoused with an orbiting stage of the Saturn 1-B rocket that had sent it into space, indicating that it would have no trouble docking with a lunar module that would carry two astronauts from the capsule to the moon and back. The Apollo 7 astronauts, who comprised NASA’s first three-man crew, also successfully tested an engine in the rear of their capsule designed to put the spacecraft into and out of lunar orbit on a future mission.

And for the first time, astronauts carried a camera providing TV images. They demonstrated how they could float in their weightless environment in what became known as “The Wally, Walt and Donn Show,” and they put together a hand-lettered sign that said, “Hello From the Lovely Apollo Room, High Atop Everything.” There was a problem, though: Schirra had a heavy head cold, Eisele had a lesser cold and Cunningham, as he would later recall, felt “a little blah.” NASA feared that the colds could result in the bursting of eardrums as the astronauts returned to Earth. They were, in fact, just fine when they splashed down some 325 miles south of Bermuda, less than a mile off target. Their mission was so successful that Apollo 8 orbited the moon, another important prelude to the moon landing in July 1969.

Goldstein is a journalist with NYT©2023

The New York Times