CUNNINGHAM, R. WALTER

born March 16, 1932, Creston, Iowa, U.S. in full Ronnie Walter Cunningham American astronaut and civilian participant in the Apollo 7 mission (Oct. 1122, 1968), in which the first manned 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 (195356). 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 manned space project in 1963. He left the space program in 1971 and became a corporation executive.