A man involved in a big part of American History has died. Walter Cunningham, the last surviving astronaut from the first successful manned space mission in NASA’s Apollo Program, died yesterday January 3, in Houston. He was 90. Cunningham 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. Cunningham was the Lunar Module Pilot on the space flight, which launched from Cape Kennedy Air Force Station, on October 11th. NASA says the spacecraft performed so well that the agency sent the next crew, Apollo 8, to orbit the moon as a prelude to the historic Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969. Cunningham on the landing:
It was NASA’s first manned space mission since the deaths of the three Apollo 1 astronauts in a launch pad fire January of 1967. Although Cunningham never crewed another space mission after Apollo 7, he remained a proponent of space exploration. Truly an American Pioneer.
