Donn Eisele

Donn Fulton Eisele was born on June 23, 1930, in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up there before entering the United States Naval Academy, from which he graduated in 1952. Rather than take a Navy commission, he transferred to the U.S. Air Force, where he built a career as an interceptor pilot and then an experimental test pilot at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. He earned a master's degree in astronautics from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1960 and accumulated more than 4,200 flight hours, the great majority of them in jet aircraft. In October 1963 NASA selected him among its third group of astronauts, the cohort brought in to carry the Gemini and Apollo programs forward toward the Moon.

Eisele made a single spaceflight, but it was one of the most consequential of the era. He served as Command Module Pilot of Apollo 7, launched on October 11, 1968 — the first crewed Apollo mission and the flight that had to prove the redesigned spacecraft was safe after the fatal Apollo 1 cabin fire of January 1967 had killed three astronauts and grounded the program. Flying with commander Wally Schirra and Lunar Module Pilot Walt Cunningham, Eisele spent eleven days in Earth orbit rigorously testing the Command and Service Module's systems, rendezvous capabilities, and engine restarts. The mission was a near-flawless engineering success that restored confidence in Apollo and cleared the path to the Moon, though it is also remembered for the crew's irritable exchanges with mission control after Schirra developed a head cold that spread to his crewmates in the cramped cabin. Eisele logged about 260 hours in space and never flew again.

After leaving both NASA and the Air Force in 1972, Eisele took an unusual second act, serving as the Peace Corps country director in Thailand before moving into private business. He died on December 2, 1987, at the age of 57, suffering a heart attack while on a business trip to Tokyo, and his ashes were later buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. His candid, sometimes wry recollections of the pressures inside the Apollo program were published posthumously in 2017 as the memoir Apollo Pilot, giving later generations an unvarnished first-hand view of the mission that put the Moon within reach.