It was NASA's first crewed space mission since the deaths of the three Apollo 1 astronauts in a launch pad fire Jan.
The Apollo 7 astronauts also won a special Emmy award for their daily television reports from orbit, during which they clowned around, held up humorous signs and educated earthlings about space flight. Cunningham, the last surviving astronaut from the first successful crewed space mission in NASA's Apollo program, has died. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday that Cunningham was "above all" an explorer whose work also laid the foundation for the agency's new Artemis moon program.Īpollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham speaks on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., during a program "Celebrating 100 Years of MIT Aerospace," Oct.
Their spacecraft performed so well that the agency sent the next crew, Apollo 8, to orbit the moon as a prelude to the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969. NASA said Cunningham, Eisele and Schirra' flew a near perfect mission. 11 and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda. Cunningham was the lunar module pilot on the space flight, which launched from Cape Kennedy Air Force Station, Florida, on Oct. His family said through a spokesman, Jeff Carr, that Cunningham died in a hospital "from complications of a fall, after a full and complete life."Ĭunningham was one of three astronauts aboard the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, an 11-day spaceflight that beamed live television broadcasts as they orbited Earth, paving the way for the moon landing less than a year later.Ĭunningham, then a civilian, crewed the mission with Navy Capt. NASA confirmed Cunningham's death in a statement but did not include its cause.
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