Walt Cunningham
Apollo’s first flight into space
Astronaut Walt Cunningham, who piloted the first crewed mission in the Apollo program, tells All About Space about the dangers they faced when making their way to the Moon in the 1960s
Interviewed by Gemma Lavender
© Getty Images
BIO
Walt Cunningham
Cunningham was the Lunar Module pilot on the Apollo 7 mission. Before his career with NASA, Cunningham served as a fighter pilot with the US Marine Corps and successfully gained a doctorate in physics. After his flight into space with Walter Schirra and Donn Eisele, Cunningham worked in a management role for the space station Skylab.
Could you tell us why you became an astronaut? It wasn’t for the money. My starting salary when I went to work for NASA was $13,050 a year. When I left eight years later, I had worked my way up to $25,000. I did sit down once and calculate that if I got paid 50 cents a mile, I would have made $2.24 million. I should mention that we weren’t covered by NASA’s flight insurance. If we had been, the payment would have been too high for the other employees of NASA. But overall, it was one of the world’s greatest jobs. The 1960s through to the 1970s was the golden age of manned space flight.
Did you always want to be an astronaut? What does it take to become one?
In 1963 I was a US Marine Corps fighter pilot, working on a doctorate in physics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). When I applied to NASA to become an astronaut, it turned out I was one of 770 qualified applicants and one of the eventual 14 that would later go into space. Some good people didn’t make it. I will never forget that we were down to 34 people when we showed up for our eight-day physical. I thought that my friend, a Navy lieutenant who went by the name of Bob Shoemaker, was a sure thing in being selected.