Video: See our full interview with Apollo 7 astronaut Walt Cunningham
Around NASA and its contractors, the phrase "Return to Flight" carries special meaning. It's used very seriously in very specific circumstances: a "Return to Flight" mission is a resumption of normal scheduled missions after an anomaly or accident. Most recently, the phrase was used to refer to the 2005 STS-114 and STS-121 shuttle flights, which were the first missions to take flight from the Kennedy Space Center following the destruction of Columbia in early 2003. Prior to that, STS-26 was the "Return to Flight" mission in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster in 1986.
But the big granddaddy of Returns to Flight was Apollo 7 in October 1968. Mindful of Kennedy's end-of-decade deadline for a lunar landing, NASA's engineers and astronauts had to fight through a complex admixture of both cautiousness and eagerness-they needed to get back into space as soon as possible, but they also needed to make sure they weren't going to kill anyone else. The job of commanding Apollo 7 landed on Mercury veteran Walter "Wally" Schirra and his rookie crew-Donn Eisele and Ronnie Walter Cunningham.
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