Charles Wayne Helms
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These pictures are of my father, Charles Helms, working with the Apollo 7 crew back in 1967. Apollo 7 was the first crewed spaceflight of the Apollo program that went into space. The crew of Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham (shown in the pictures below) spent nearly 11 days in space as they orbited Earth and tested out the command module spacecraft that was designed to bring humans safely to the moon and back again.
The Apollo 7 flight was so successful that NASA leapfrogged the next flight to lunar orbit. Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham piloted a near-flawless shakedown of the Apollo command and service modules after their redesign resulting from the Apollo fire. And despite some friction between the crew and Mission Control, Wally’s famous (or maybe infamous) sense of humor came through as the crew provided the first live TV transmissions from space as “The Wally, Walt, and Donn Show… From the Apollo Room, High Atop Everything.”
