Cunningham, Walter

Walter Cunningham, in full Ronnie Walter Cunningham, (born March 16, 1932, Creston, Iowa, U.S.—died January 3, 2023, Houston, Texas), American astronaut and civilian participant in the Apollo 7 mission (October 11–22, 1968), in which the first crewed flight of Apollo Command and Service modules was made.

Cunningham enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1951 and transferred to the Marine Corps, where he served as a fighter pilot (1953–56). He majored in physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, receiving bachelor’s (1960) and master’s (1961) degrees but abandoning a doctoral program in favour of the crewed space project in 1963. He left the space program in 1971 and became a corporation executive.