NASA flight director lauded for leading rescue of Apollo 13 astronauts
Glynn S. Lunney, the NASA flight director who played a major role in America’s space program and was hailed for his leadership in the rescue of three Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was rocked by an explosion en route to the moon in 1973, died March 19 at his home in Clear Lake, Texas. He was 84.
The cause was stomach cancer, his son Shawn said.
Mr. Lunney (rhymes with “sunny”), who joined NASA at its inception in 1958 and became its chief flight director in 1968, worked out of Mission Control in Houston in developing the elaborate procedures for the flight of Apollo 11, sending Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on their pioneering journey to the moon in July 1969.
He managed the July 1975 mission in which an Apollo spacecraft with three astronauts docked with a twoman Russian Soyuz spaceship. Each vehicle carried equipment that would facilitate another linkup someday if an international rescue mission were needed. The Americans and the Russians carried out joint experiments and exchanged commemorative gifts in what became a step toward cooperation among nations in space aboard the International Space Station.
But Mr. Lunney was remembered especially for his take-charge efforts in the dramatic rescue of the Apollo 13 astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert.
Along with three other flight directors and numerous NASA scientists and astronauts at the command center, he worked out the complex plan that enabled them to make it back to Earth.
Mr. Lunney looked back on the effort as “the best piece of operations work I ever did or could hope to do.”
“We built a quarter-million-mile space highway paved by one decision, one choice and one innovation at a time, repeated constantly over almost four days to bring the crew safely home,” he recalled in an interview.
Because the astronauts’ command module had been crippled by the explosion, Mission Control directed them to use their undamaged lunar lander as a lifeboat to carry them home.
The lander was originally designed to descend to the moon from the orbiting Apollo 13 craft, with Mr. Swigert aboard, and then return to the mother ship with Mr. Lovell and Mr. Haise for the journey home. But the Houston ground crew, working under intense time pressure with no blueprint, improvised a way for them to make a safe splashdown in the Pacific huddled together in the lunar lander.
Mr. Lunney was among the NASA officials who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Richard M. Nixon for the rescue. In the hit 1995 movie “Apollo 13,” Marc McClure played Mr. Lunney.
Glynn Stephen Lunney was born on Nov. 27, 1936, in Old Forge, Lackawanna County, to William Lunney, a coal miner and welder, and Helen Glynn Lunney.
As a youngster, he was intrigued by flight and filled his room with model airplanes. He earned a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Detroit (now the University of Detroit Mercy) after working in a cooperative program in which he divided time between his studies and working for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA.
Among the numerous achievements of his NASA career, Mr. Lunney was lead flight director for Apollo 7, the first crewed Apollo flight, and Apollo 10, the dress rehearsal for the first moon landing.
He retired from NASA in 1985 as manager of the space shuttle program, but he continued to lead spaceflight activities in private industry.
In addition to his son Shawn, Mr. Lunney is survived by his wife, Marilyn Jean (Kurtz) Lunney, who was a nurse in a NASA forerunner research center; two other sons, Glynn Jr. and Bryan; a daughter, Jenifer Brayley; two brothers, Bill and Gerry; a sister, Carol; and 12 grandchildren.