Walter Cunningham

• 1. Introduction

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  Walter Cunningham sat in the lunar module pilot seat on the 11th of October 1968, aboard a spacecraft with no lunar module attached. Apollo 7 was the first crewed mission the Apollo program had ever flown. Its eleven days of system tests had to succeed before anyone could go to the Moon. Cunningham was NASA's third civilian astronaut, after Neil Armstrong and Elliot See. He was born in Creston, Iowa on the 16th of March 1932 and would live to age 90. What brought him to that seat, and what he chose to argue about for the rest of his life, are both questions worth following.

• 2. A Movie and a War

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  Hell Divers, a movie Cunningham recalled seeing around 1940, fixed a specific ambition in him. He wanted to serve as a lieutenant commander in the Naval Air Corps. He graduated from Venice High School in Los Angeles in 1950 and enrolled at Santa Monica College, intending to become an architect. That plan changed in 1951 when he joined the U.S. Navy. Cunningham enlisted rather than waiting to be drafted, a choice that promised an earlier return than the draft would have allowed. To qualify for service, he first had to pass a two-year college equivalency test. Flight training began in 1952. By 1953, he was serving with the U.S. Marine Corps in Korea, flying 54 missions as a night fighter pilot. Armistice talks were still underway when he left the United States; the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed just before he arrived in theater. Cunningham served on active duty until 1956 and continued in the Marine Corps Reserve until 1975, eventually retiring as a colonel. The science building at Venice High School was later named Cunningham Hall in his honor.

• 3. Physics and RAND

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  After leaving active duty, Cunningham returned to Santa Monica College and then transferred to UCLA in 1958. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in physics with honors in 1960, and a Master of Arts in physics with distinction in 1961. At the RAND Corporation, where he spent three years, he completed every requirement for a Doctor of Philosophy in physics except the dissertation. NASA selected him as part of its third astronaut group in October 1963. Five years separated that selection from his first spaceflight.

• 4. Apollo 7

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  The service module engine fired successfully during the mission, one of the key tests the crew was assigned to carry out. Cunningham bore responsibility for every spacecraft system except launch and navigation. The crew filled their schedule with instrument accuracy measurements and hardware evaluations. Cunningham accumulated 263 hours in space on that single flight. His overall flying career totaled more than 4,500 hours, with more than 3,400 in jet aircraft. The International Space Hall of Fame inducted him in 1983, and the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame followed in 1997.

• 5. After the Flight

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  Following Apollo 7, Cunningham headed the Skylab branch of the Astronaut Office at Johnson Space Center. He held that position from 1968 to 1971, coordinating the operational development, system integration, and habitability design for Skylab hardware. Cunningham later said he was informally offered the command of Skylab 2. The position officially went to Pete Conrad, who had commanded Apollo 12, and Cunningham was then offered the backup commander role. He left NASA rather than take it. On the 17th of June 1971, his resignation was announced, effective on or about the 1st of August. He went to Houston as Vice President of Operations for Century Development Corp., which was building Greenway Plaza.

  In 1974, he completed Harvard Business School's six-week Advanced Management Program. He published The All-American Boys in 1977, a memoir of his astronaut years. He was a major contributor to In the Shadow of the Moon, a space history book published in 2007, and wrote its foreword. In 2008, NASA awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal for his Apollo 7 mission. He worked as a radio talk-show host, public speaker, businessman, and consultant to start-up technology companies. He also served as chairman of the Texas Aerospace Commission. In 2018, he joined the Back to Space organization as an Astronaut Consultant, with the goal of inspiring the next generation to go to Mars.

  Cunningham married Lo Ella Irby of Norwalk, California; they had two children, Brian and Kimberley, and later divorced. His second wife was Dorothy "Dot" Cunningham, a retired Houston businesswoman. Fredric Lehne portrayed Cunningham in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.

• 6. Science and Skepticism

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  In 2010, Cunningham published a short book titled Global Warming: Facts versus Faith. An editorial he wrote appeared in the Houston Chronicle on the 15th of August 2010. He argued there that empirical evidence did not support the scientific consensus on climate change. Cunningham rejected that consensus outright. His biography page at the CO2 Coalition stated his position plainly. Since 2000, it noted, he had been "writing and speaking out on the hoax that humans are controlling the temperature of the earth." In 2012, he joined other former astronauts and NASA employees in sending a critical letter to the agency. That letter challenged what the signatories described as "unproven assertions that man-made carbon dioxide was a major factor in global warming." Cunningham died in Houston on the 3rd of January 2023, from complications resulting from a fall.