Walter Cunningham was an astronaut who flew on the first crewed mission of the Apollo Moon program to go into space.

Cunningham was born on March 16, 1932, in Creston, Iowa. He graduated high school in Venice, Calif., and then attended Santa Monica College and the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a bachelor's degree and a master's degree, specializing in physics. In between, during the Korean War, he joined the U.S. Navy and flew dozens of combat missions for the Marine Corps.

After the war, Cunningham served in the Marine Reserves; in fact, he was in the Reserves for several years after his time in the Apollo program. He worked at the RAND Corporation for a few years and was in 1963 named one of NASA's third group of astronauts.

He made his only trip into space aboard Apollo 7, in October 1968. The mission was the first crewed launch of the Apollo program and the first since the disastrous Apollo 1 in 1967. The Apollo 7 mission was a test of many improvements that NASA had made since the first Apollo mission: fire-retardant spacesuits and in-capsule materials, a nitrogen-oxygen mix in the interior atmosphere, and more resilient wiring throughout.

Cunningham was a businessman and investor in his later career. He was also a writer, publishing The All-American Boys, an astronaut memoir, in 1977 and contributing to the 2007 book In the Shadow of the Moon. In recent years, he has added public speaking and radio show hosting to his resume.