Walt Cunningham

College Friend

“I’m hard pressed to describe a sensation that equates with flying. It’s absolutely the most natural thing I ever did in my life.”

“If I’d been sitting there in an SMC classroom in my student days,” says Walt Cunningham, former NASA astronaut, “and someone told me that what I was doing could prepare me to go to the moon, you think I’d have ever believed them?”

Walt Cunningham doesn’t look at everyday experience in quite the same way the rest of us do. For him, driving on the freeway is an experience in “moving through a velocity and acceleration field.” His is a view of the world shaped by “being at the peak of the mountain and flying the hottest thing going” and by several extra terrestrial trips he took as an astronaut for NASA. And yet, much of Cunningham’s success he attributes to very “earthbound” experiences that kept his feet on the ground.

“I’ve always looked at everything I do as being preparation for life’s next step,” says Cunningham. “And you never know what the next step will be. So I just urge young people to keep on reaching, to use their time productively. In my case,” he continues, “I got a wonderful education at SMC and—who knows?—without it, I might not have gone on to do the job I did for NASA.”

These days, Cunningham runs a large venture capital firm in Houston, Texas. And though he’s far from the launch pad, he still brings a figher pilot’s ethic to his approach to life. For Walt, the “right stuff” is all about learning. “Luck is just a thing that happens when opportunity meets preparation. And the key to all things is education,” he continues. “Those that try to make it easy, or try to take the shortcuts, are never going to succeed. Learning is a prize. And it’s worth paying the price for.”

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