Walter Cunningham, the last surviving astronaut from the first successful crewed space mission in NASA's Apollo program, has died. He was 90.
NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs confirmed Cunningham's death to The Associated Press but did not immediately provide further details. Cunningham's wife, Dot Cunningham, said in a statement that he died Tuesday but did not say where or provide a cause of death.
NASA said Cunningham, Eisele and Schirra' flew a near perfect mission. 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. Cunningham recalled Apollo 7 during a 2017 event at the Kennedy Space Center, saying it "enabled us to overcome all the obstacles we had after the Apollo 1 fire and it became the longest, most successful test flight of any flying machine ever."
"We never even knew that there were astronauts when I was growing up," Cunningham told The Spokesman-Review.
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