Key Takeaways:
- Apollo 7, crewed by Walter Schirra Jr., Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham, represented the first manned American spaceflight 21 months after the Apollo 1 fatal accident.
- Launching on October 11, 1968, from Cape Kennedy, the mission successfully concluded after 10 days and 20 hours in orbit, splashing down on October 22.
- Primary objectives included demonstrating successful crew, mission support, and spacecraft capabilities as essential preparations for subsequent manned lunar missions.
- The mission followed the implementation of approximately 1,060 spacecraft modifications over 21 months by the crew and engineers, aimed at resuming the lunar landing schedule.
Twenty-one months after the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew in a fire during a test on the launchpad, the three men who had originally served as their backup crew — Walter Schirra Jr., Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham — flew on Apollo 7. The first manned American spaceflight since the accident, their mission was a resounding success, speeding the Apollo program ahead to reach the Moon by the end of the decade.
Apollo 7 launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida, Oct. 11, 1968. Onboard was a three-man crew of commander (Schirra), command module pilot (Eisele), and lunar module pilot (Cunningham). They remained in orbit for 10 days 20 hours before splashing down Oct. 22. The mission aimed to achieve several key objectives, including the demonstration of successful crew, mission support, and spacecraft capabilities in preparation for manned missions to the Moon.
“We were very pleased to be making the flight,” Cunningham told Astronomy in a 2018 interview for the 50th anniversary of the mission. “The general public at large was excited and kind of filled with tenseness over the fact that the last one had been a fatal accident. But we spent that 21 months getting about 1,060 changes in the spacecraft. Our crew was responsible for some of them, the engineers were responsible for most of them, and were all working together, looking forward to getting back on schedule and landing a man on the Moon before the decade was out, because that was the goal.”
