MISSION MOON
HOW 50 YEARS OF SPACE EXPLORATION DEFINED HOUSTON
Our special anniversary coverage of the July 20, 1969, moon landing continues today with a look at a storied engineer who became one of NASA’s first flight directors.
Glynn Lunney was thumbing through a magazine in 1957 when he came across a story about humans rocketing into space.
His heart sank. He’d missed it.
Thankfully, the story turned out to be a work of fiction. Lunney — who at the time was turning his fascination with flight into a career by studying aeronautical engineering at the University of Detroit — still had a chance to help the country put a man in space.
“I wanted to be a part of that,” Lunney, now 82, told the Houston Chronicle recently.
And a part of it he was. Over the next 30 years, Lunney built an illustrious career at NASA that started with Project Mercury and stretched all the way into the early years of the space shuttle program.
“His outstanding efforts have benefited space exploration for over 50 years,” said Tracy Lamm, chief operating officer of Space Center Houston, the museum side of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “He is a true space hero and someone who has provided significant leadership for numerous missions.”
But the years leading up the moon landing were by far the most exciting for Lunney.
“We couldn’t believe (President John F.) Kennedy went out on a limb like that,” Lunney said of Kennedy’s commitment to putting a man on the moon before 1970. “We didn’t even know how to do it.”
Spaceflight ‘icon’
After graduating from the University of Detroit in 1958, Lunney moved to Ohio to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — an organization that later became NASA. He learned about the country’s work in human spaceflight there and jumped at the chance to join the effort to rocket humans out of Earth’s orbit.
Lunney quickly became involved in Mission Control operations, serving as one of the first flight directors at the agency.
Flight directors are in charge of keeping the astronauts and spacecraft safe by leading teams of controllers, researchers, engineers and support personnel at Johnson Space Center in Houston. And if something goes wrong, flight directors must make split-second decisions while holding someone’s life in their hands.
He worked on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. And in 1968, he was named chief of NASA’s flight directors, meaning he supervised all the flight directors and trained the flight controllers.
He was on duty as Apollo 11 descended to the moon’s surface in 1969 and during parts of the near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission in 1970, when an oxygen-tank explosion forced NASA to abort the moon landing.
Lunney is a human spaceflight “icon,” said John Charles, the museum’s scientist in residence.
“(His) career at NASA during the height of the Apollo program gave (him) the opportunity to work with some of the undisputed giants of the Space Age and, soon enough, to become one of those giants,” Charles said.
Chasing the moon
In 1972, Lunney became manager of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union docked their two vehicles in space for the first time. A year later, he managed the Apollo Spacecraft Office.
Lunney continued working for NASA after the last man stepped foot on the moon in 1972, holding a variety of positions, including deputy associate administrator for space flight from 1976-77 and acting associate administrator for space-transportation operations from 1979-80. Both appointments were based at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
He also worked on the engineering and design of spaceshuttle vehicle systems from 1981-85.
He retired from NASA in 1985 and started working for Rockwell International and, later, United Space Alliance.
Lunney and his wife, Marilyn, have four children. Soon after Lunney’s retirement, his son, Bryan, joined Mission Control at NASA. Over a 22-year career, Bryan Lunney managed 50 space shuttle missions and more than 300 shifts in charge of the International Space Station.
“He followed in my footsteps,” Glynn Lunney said.
Lunney now spends his days reading and hanging out with his grandkids at his home in the Clear Lake area.
And though he’s long retired from NASA, the memories of chasing the moon are always with him — in the form of memorabilia filling the bookshelves that line his wood-paneled office.
“It sure was fun,” he said.
“We couldn’t believe (President John F.) Kennedy went out on a limb like that. … We didn’t even know how to do it.”
— Glynn Lunney, former NASA flight director