One of the mission’s few hiccups occurred shortly after liftoff, when Schirra developed symptoms of a cold. “Well, if you listen to the outsiders or even some of the ground controllers … today they probably still think that we all got sick. But that’s not the case. Actually, Wally was the one that got sick,” says Cunningham. “But Wally didn’t want to have the world thinking that somehow or other he was weak and he got a cold and we didn’t. So he insisted that we all take the cold pills.”
As for the effect on the mission, “it kind of tied him up a little bit. He was not as efficient the first couple of days, but after that, he went back on,” says Cunningham. “He was the most experienced one — the only experienced one — in the cockpit, and we did very well with accomplishing the mission objectives. But the fallout from that was that Wally irritated the ground controllers to some degree.”
A successful first flight
Apollo 7’s crew spent more time in space than the initial Moon landings would ultimately require. They took with them a packed list of objectives to complete, and they were so successful that Mission Control added several more tasks to maximize the mission’s benefits during the flight.
“In the end, it was declared 101 percent successful,” says Cunningham. “And historically, if you look back at it, it is still today, 50 years later, the longest, the most ambitious, the most successful first test flight of any new flying machine ever.”