Apollo 7 tested the first crewed Apollo — with head colds

Apollo 7, the first crewed Apollo mission, launched from Launch Complex 34 at Cape Kennedy on October 11, 1968, with Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham aboard, the first Americans in space for nearly 22 months. NASA had grounded crews after the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts in January 1967.

The redesigned spacecraft showed the lessons: an outward-opening hatch, far fewer flammable materials, and a launch-pad cabin atmosphere of 65% oxygen and 35% nitrogen instead of pure oxygen. The flight piled up firsts, including the first three-person American spaceflight, the first crew launched by a Saturn rocket, the first humans to ride a liquid-hydrogen stage, and the first hot meals in space.

It also became the flight of the head colds. About 15 hours in, Schirra reported one, and Eisele and Cunningham soon followed. In weightlessness, fluid shifts toward the head and congestion does not drain, and the crew feared that cabin pressure rising from 5 to 14.7 psi during re-entry could rupture their eardrums if they could not blow their noses. They asked to come home with helmets off; after much discussion, Mission Control reluctantly agreed. The colds likely fed the friction with the ground that marked the mission.

They still delivered. Schirra joked that the crew was “going to try for an Emmy for the best weekly series” with their broadcasts, the first live TV from an American spacecraft, and in 1969 they won a special Emmy.

Apollo 7 splashed down southeast of Bermuda on October 22 after 163 orbits. Its nearly 11 days showed the crew and spacecraft could last an 8-day lunar mission, and Apollo program director Samuel Phillips said it had “accomplished 101%” of its objectives. In November 1968, NASA formally announced that Apollo 8 would go to lunar orbit.