Apollo 7: NASA's first crewed Apollo flight

On Oct. 11, 1968, Apollo 7 launched with NASA astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham aboard. It was the first Apollo mission to carry a crew into space, Space.com reports.

The flight came 20 months after a fire killed three astronauts during a launch rehearsal, and it restarted a program that had been grounded. NASA's goal was to show the spacecraft worked. The mission was, in effect, a test flight: flight controllers and engineers wanted confirmation that the fixes made after the January 1967 Apollo 1 fire had taken. NASA and North American Aviation, the prime contractor for the Apollo command module, had overhauled the vehicle to make it safe for crews.

Apollo 7's job was to confirm those changes worked and that the command module was space worthy, a shakedown cruise before any attempt at the moon. The stakes went beyond the spacecraft. If Apollo 7 had failed, Space.com reports, NASA's chances of meeting President John F. Kennedy's 1961 goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade ended would have been called into question, with the clock running down and political pressure mounting to shut down the expensive moon program.

Eleven days, three unhappy campers

The crew spent 11 days in orbit, and it was not a comfortable ride. Motion sickness hit after launch, then Schirra came down with a cold, and the astronauts argued with mission control and with one another. None of the three flew in space again.

The hardware, by contrast, held up. NASA judged the mission a 101% success, and it set up the first lunar landing in July 1969.

In its day, the Apollo command module was the most complex machine ever built by man to be operated by man. We launched on the longest and most ambitious engineering test flight in history, testing the spacecraft systems, verifying the operating procedures, checking out the worldwide tracking network, and that's not to mention testing our crew.

That is Apollo 7 pilot Walt Cunningham, speaking on the 40th anniversary of the flight in 2008.

The crew's work carried forward. Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, credited them directly: "All of us in the flights that followed were dependent on the Apollo 7 crew doing their job," he said. "So thanks Walt and Wally and Donn."

Why it still matters

Every crewed flight that followed rested on what Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham proved over those 11 days: that the command module could carry people safely, and that the procedures and tracking network around it worked. The moon landing came nine months later.

Apollo 7 is one of the dates Space.com tracks in its On This Day In Space archive, along with the Oct. 10, 1967, ratification of the Outer Space Treaty.

• Apollo 7
• Apollo program
• NASA
• space history
• Wally Schirra