Glynn Lunney, who was one of NASA’s first employees and rose through the ranks to become an icon of Mission Control, died March 19 at the age of 84. According to reports, he had been fighting leukemia for the past several years, and he died at his home in Clear Lake, Texas.
Lunney started working for NASA’s predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) while studying aeronautical engineering at the University of Detroit. One month after he graduated in 1958, a presidential order from Dwight Eisenhower transformed NACA into NASA. In 1959, Lunney joined the new agency’s Space Task Group as an aeronautical research engineer. At just 22 years, he was the group’s youngest member. There, he pioneered the techniques that NASA would use to calculate and track the trajectories of spacecraft.
After working as a flight controller on the Mercury program, Lunney became a flight director, leading teams of mission controllers during a dozen Gemini and Apollo missions. In 1968, he was appointed chief of the Flight Director’s Office, overseeing all of NASA’s flight directors. His fellow flight director, Gene Kranz, wrote that Lunney was “smart as a whip, boyish and trim,” and “the pioneer leader of trajectory operations, who turned his craft from an art practiced by a few into a pure science.”
Lunney remained at NASA until 1985, when he retired from his position as manager of the Space Shuttle Program, having guided it through its first four years of flight operations. He continued to work in the space industry with Rockwell International and United Space Alliance until 1998.
A starring role in NASA’s finest hour
In a NASA oral history, Lunney said that he thought of the Mission Control Centers in Florida and Houston, “as a kind of a church. It was a cathedral of sorts where we went and did what we thought was important work for our country and for humanity, and we did it in this place where we all came together and struggled, mightily at some times, with the problems that we faced and reaction response that we had to bring to the table.”