NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13 mission

Glynn Lunney, one of NASA’s first flight directors, who had a major role in guiding astronauts to the moon and whose cool decision-making under pressure helped save the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 after an onboard explosion, died March 19 at his home in Clear Lake, Texas. He was 84. He had been treated for several years for leukemia.

Lunney joined the space program during its infancy in the 1950s and helped develop the Mercury spacecraft used in the first U.S. crewed flights in the early 1960s.

He was the fourth person selected to be a NASA flight director, a job he described as the “leader of all that went on in mission control, and all of the stuff that went up to the flight crews by way of recommendations and decisions.”

Lunney was a leading behind-the-scenes figure in the Gemini and Apollo crewed flight programs of the 1960s.

In 1968, he became the chief of NASA’s flight director’s office, responsible for supervising other flight directors and training the many flight controllers and engineers who worked at what is now the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

He was one of four flight directors for Apollo 11, the 1969 mission on which astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first people to set foot on the moon.

The next year, he was one of four flight directors for Apollo 13, along with Milton Windler, Gerald Griffin and Eugene Kranz. The mission, with astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, was scheduled to go to the moon.

They were 80% of the way to their destination on April 13, 1970, when “all of us heard a rather large bang,” Lovell later said.

It turned out that wires from a fan had struck metal inside one of the spacecraft’s two oxygen tanks, sparking an explosion.

Survivors include his wife since 1960, the former Marilyn Kurtz of Clear Lake; four children; two brothers; a sister; and 12 grandchildren.