Cunningham piloted the first manned Apollo mission, a key step in the drive to reach the moon, but he never flew in space again. He was a physicist who later became known as a climate-change skeptic.
Lunar module pilot Walt Cunningham performs flight tasks on the ninth day of the Apollo 7 mission in 1968.
flew in space just one time. His flight in 1968 was an important — and often forgotten one — for the lunar program.'s 11-day trip around the Earth was a key stepping stone to NASA's march to the moon."The real accomplishment, of course, was the first manned landing on the moon," Cunningham told NPR in 2016."But that was the fifth of what I've always described as five giant steps. The first one was the Apollo 7 mission, of course. Complete test of the Apollo spacecraft.
. In the interim, NASA changed many procedures and the command module underwent a series of safety improvements.Astronauts Walt Cunningham of Apollo 7, and Jim Lovell of Apollo 8 and Apollo 13, participate in an event in Washington marking the 40th anniversary anniversary of the first moon landing. "There were so many things that had to be tested," he recalled. During the flight, the crew test-fired the engine that would place Apollo into and out of lunar orbit, simulated docking maneuvers and did the first-ever live television broadcast from an American spacecraft."It was hard to imagine that we could get through all those things [in an 11-day mission] without something going wrong and saying, 'hey you need to gotta come home," Cunningham said.
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