March 20, 2020 – Glynn Lunney

Today the flags of the United States and NASA fly at half staff to commemorate the life of Glynn Lunney, who was a pivotal figure in NASA. , a Flight Director (Black Flight). Lunney received the Presidential Medal of Freedom as part of the Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team.

Quoting his wikipedia entry, “An employee of NASA at its creation in 1958, Lunney was a flight director (Black Flight) during the Gemini and Apollo programs, and was on duty during historic events such as the Apollo 11 lunar ascent and the pivotal hours of the Apollo 13 crisis. At the end of the Apollo program, he became manager of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first collaboration in spaceflight between the United States and the Soviet Union. Later, he served as manager of the Space Shuttle program before leaving NASA in 1985 and later becoming a vice president of the United Space Alliance.”

Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director, described Lunney as “a true hero of the space age”, saying that he was “one of the outstanding contributors to the exploration of space of the last four decades”.

Quoting NASA’s remembrance of Mr. Lunney, “One of the most notable events in his career came April 13, 1970, after an oxygen tank in the Apollo 13 service module exploded on the way to the Moon. His team reacted quickly and effectively to prepare the astronauts and their spacecraft to complete a safe-return trajectory around the Moon and return home safely. Under Lunney’s direction, the team innovated and worked with the astronauts to deliberately shut down the command module systems so that the lunar module could be used as a lifeboat for the crew during the journey home to Earth. His team’s work was widely credited with keeping the crew alive and safe while longer-term plans were developed for a successful reentry and splashdown.

In Lunney’s own words from his NASA oral history: “I felt that the Black Team shift immediately after the explosion and for the next 14 hours was the best piece of operations work I ever did or could hope to do. It posed a continuous demand for the best decisions often without hard data and mostly on the basis of judgment, in the face of the most severe in-flight emergency faced thus far in manned space flight. There might have been a ‘better’ solution, but it still is not apparent what it would be. Perhaps, we could have been a little quicker at times but we were consciously deliberate.”