Walter Cunningham, the last surviving astronaut from the first successful crewed space mission in NASA’s Apollo program, died Tuesday in Houston.
It was NASA’s first crewed space mission since the deaths of the three Apollo 1 astronauts in a launch pad fire Jan. 27, 1967.
“We never even knew that there were astronauts when I was growing up,” Cunningham told The Spokesman-Review.
After retiring from NASA in 1971, Cunningham worked in engineering, business and investing, and became a public speaker and radio host.
Although Cunningham never crewed another space mission after Apollo 7, he remained a proponent of space exploration.