Editor’s note: Each month, Dispatch reporters will profile astronauts from Ohio, culminating in a larger story toward the end of the year about all Ohioans who became astronauts.
In October 1968, Donn Eisele spent 11 days orbiting the Earth
and witnessing its splendor from space. Though he was miles away from home, Columbus residents looked up to the skies knowing their hometown hero was making history.Eisele was one of three crew members aboard the Apollo 7 spacecraft, the first manned mission after NASA resumed sending astronauts into space, which launched on Oct. 11, 1968. He was joined by Walter Cunningham and commander Wally Schirra.
Eisele was hailed as an American hero and was among the earliest Ohioans sent to space. He piloted the first
Apollo spacecraft to test the command and service module in space. His flight helped pave the way for the first Americans to land on the moon. And the Apollo 7 crew was the first to broadcast their work in space on live TV.
However, Eisele's star faded in the decades following his return to Earth. He never returned to space in part because of drama during the Apollo 7 mission and tumult in his personal life. Those factors, coupled with his untimely death at age 57, have led some to call Eisele "Columbus' forgotten astronaut."
But his life and achievements still give context to a compelling chapter in the history of the U.S. space program.
From the West Side to NASA
Eisele was born in Columbus on June 23, 1930, to Herman and June Eisele. Growing up with his two sisters on the city's West Side, he went to Highland Avenue Elementary School and was a 1948 graduate of West High School.
He participated in Boy Scouts and rose to the rank of Eagle Scout, ran high school track and was remembered as a quiet, well-behaved kid who always seemed to be smiling.
"He wasn't one of those rah-rah types of people. He was one of those quiet leaders," Pat Collins, a friend who went to West High School with Eisele, told The Dispatch after his death in 1987.
Eisele attended the U.S. Naval Academy after high school and was proud that he entered through competitive examination, rather than political appointment, according to his New York Times obituary.
Upon graduation, Eisele took a commission in the still relatively new U.S. Air Force and became a test pilot at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. He married Harriet Hamilton in 1952, with whom he had four children.
Eisele joined the space program and earned a master’s degree in astronautics from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1960. He was selected in 1963 to become part of NASA’s third contingent of astronauts.
He was originally set to be on the crew of the Apollo 1 mission, but after he dislocated his shoulder during training and needed surgery, Eisele was replaced and made a member of the backup crew.
Tragically, Apollo 1 never made it into space. The crew died in a cabin fire during a rehearsal launch test in January 1967. The accident temporarily suspended manned U.S. space flights.
About a year later, the Apollo 1 backup crew was slated to become the Apollo 7 crew, setting the stage for Eisele's first and only flight in space.
Apollo 7 mission a '101%' success for NASA
The temperatures reached into the 80s at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Oct. 11, 1968, but the heat was nothing compared to the blaze of orange flames that shot out as Apollo 7 lifted off from the launch pad for its historic flight.
Apollo 7 achieved an elliptical orbit between 140 and 183 miles above Earth within 10 minutes of the launch.
According to the New York Times, Eisele was described as "the most methodical and introspective of the crew of the Apollo 7." As the spacecraft's pilot, his primary job was to check out the intricate guidance and navigation system of the spacecraft.
In addition to testing the command and service module in the spacecraft, the Apollo 7 mission was also meant to show that one could send live TV broadcasts from space.
The astronauts filmed daily 10-minute television shows from orbit that they dubbed “The Walt, Wally and Donn Show.” The clips were meant to educate Earthlings about space flight, but the crew became celebrities for their playful banter and the silly signs they held up for the camera. Eisele and the rest of the Apollo 7 crew won a special Emmy Award for their work.
The crew also earned the distinction of being the first astronauts to develop head colds in space. According to NASA, Schirra developed a bad cold about 15 hours into the flight, and Cunningham and Eisele soon caught the bug. The lack of gravity in space made it difficult to drain their heads of mucus, so they had no choice but to endure their symptoms with the help of aspirin and nasal decongestants.
Gen. Samuel C. Phillips, then-director of the Apollo Program Office at NASA Headquarters, declared that Apollo 7 “accomplished 101%” of its planned objectives upon the crew's return home.
After his return to Earth, Columbus officials gave their native son the red-carpet treatment when he visited the day after Thanksgiving in 1968. Eisele visited his alma mater West High School for an assembly with honors, attended a Downtown parade with thousands of onlookers and rounded out his evening with an 800-person dinner at the Sheraton Hotel.
The following day, Ohio State University honored Eisele at a luncheon. He and his wife, Harriet, also got 50-yard-line seats to watch the Buckeyes, ranked No. 1 in the country and led by Coach Woody Hayes, take down the No. 4 Michigan Wolverines.
Honoring Columbus' forgotten astronaut
Though the Apollo 7 mission was marked as a success, all was not as well as it seemed.
There were tensions between the crew and ground control, especially with Schirra, who had been in space twice before and did not hesitate to question actions and procedures. Reporters at the time noticed a “snappishness” from the crew in their conversations with mission control.
The discomfort from their colds mixed with disagreements with mission control that led to a "mini-mutiny" from the crew during re-entry soured relations with NASA.
Eisele’s personal life also had its share of difficulties. His parents both died from heart attacks five days apart in 1964. His son, Matthew, died of leukemia months before his mission 1968. Eisele and his wife divorced in 1969. Later that year, he married his second wife, Susan, with whom he would have two more children.
Whether from the tensions built up during the Apollo 7 mission, his divorce in an era when such breakups were frowned upon or a combination of the two, NASA did not schedule Eisele to return to space. He served as a backup crew member for the Apollo 10 mission and left the astronaut program in 1970. He retired from the Air Force in 1972.
Eisele spent two years directing the Peace Corps in Thailand in the 1970s before shifting to the corporate world. He moved to Florida, where he managed accounts for investment and securities firms.
Like his parents, Eisele died of a heart attack on Dec. 2, 1987, while in Tokyo on a business trip. He was 57 years old. Eisele’s body was cremated and his ashes buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
The Apollo 7 mission helped restore America's trust in NASA and manned space travel, and the work of Eisele and his crew mates set the stage for NASA to fast-track the Apollo 8 flight to orbit the moon.
Forty years after their mission,the Apollo 7 crew finally received Distinguished Service Medals, NASA’s highest honor. Both Schirra and Eisele were awarded the honors posthumously. It was an honor that had been received by every other Apollo astronaut.
Fellow Apollo astronauts who attended the ceremony in 2008 praised the service of Eisele, Schirra and Cunningham in the space program.
"All of us in the flights that followed were dependent on the Apollo 7 crew doing their job," Neil Armstrong said at the time, "so thanks Walt and Wally and Donn."
Higher education reporter Sheridan Hendrix can be reached at shendrix@dispatch.com and on Signal at @sheridan.120. You can follow her on Instagram at @sheridanwrites.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Astronaut Donn Eisele went from Columbus' West Side to piloting Apollo 7
