The last living member of NASA’s Apollo program’s inaugural successful crewed space mission, Walter Cunningham, passed away on Tuesday in Houston. He was 90.
Cunningham’s death was acknowledged by NASA in a statement, but the reason of death was left out. Cunningham’s family reported that he passed away in a hospital ‘after complications of a fall, after a long and complete life,’ through a representative named Jeff Carr.
The mission’s crew also included majors Donn F. Eisele of the Air Force and Walter M. Schirra of the Navy.
Cunningham was a civilian at the time. On the space mission, which took out from Cape Kennedy Air Force Station in Florida on October 11 and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean south of Bermuda, Cunningham was the lunar module’s pilot.
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.
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.
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