Glynn Stephen Lunney (November 27, 1936 – March 19, 2021) was an American NASA engineer. Lunney was an employee of NASA since its creation in 1958, a flight director during the Gemini and Apollo programs. Lunney 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.
Lunney was a key figure in the US human spaceflight program from Project Mercury through the coming of the Space Shuttle. He received numerous awards for his work, including the National Space Trophy, which he was given by the Rotary Club in 2005. 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".
Glynn Stephen Lunney was born in the coal city of Old Forge, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, on November 27, 1936, the eldest son of William Lunney, a welder and former miner who encouraged his son to get an education and to find a job beyond the mines, and his wife Helen Glynn Lunney. He graduated from the Scranton Preparatory School in 1953.
A childhood interest in model airplanes prompted Lunney to study engineering in college. After attending the University of Scranton (1953–1955), he transferred to the University of Detroit, where he enrolled in the cooperative training program run by the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The center was a part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), a United States federal agency founded to promote aeronautical research. Cooperative students at NACA took part in a program that combined work and study, providing a way for them to fund their college degrees while gaining experience in aeronautics. Lunney graduated from college in June 1958, with a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering.
After graduation, Lunney remained with NACA. His first job was as a researcher in aerospace dynamics at Lewis Research Center, where he worked with a team studying the thermodynamics of vehicles during high-speed reentry. Using a B-57 Canberra bomber, the team sent small rockets high into the atmosphere in order to measure their heating profile.
Only a month after Lunney graduated, President Eisenhower signed into existence the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), into which NACA was subsumed. His timing was perfect, for as Lunney later said, "there was no such thing as space flight until the month I got out of college". Lunney was soon transferred to Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where in September 1959 he became a member of the Space Task Group, which was the body given responsibility for the creation of NASA's human spaceflight program. Aged twenty-one, he was the youngest of the forty-five members of the group. His first assignment was with the Control Center Simulation Group, which planned the simulations used to train both flight controllers and astronauts for the as-yet unknown experience of human spaceflight.
A member of the Flight Operations Division, Lunney was one of the engineers responsible for planning and creating procedures for Project Mercury, America's first human spaceflight program. He took part in the writing of the first set of mission rules, the guidelines by which both flight controllers and astronauts operated. During Mercury, Lunney became, after Tecwyn Roberts, the second man to serve as the Flight Dynamics Officer (FIDO) in the Mercury Control Center, controlling the trajectory of the spacecraft and planning adjustments to it.
Lunney's colleague Gene Kranz described him as "the pioneer leader of trajectory operations, who turned his craft from an art practiced by a few into a pure science". It was during these years that Lunney became the protege of flight director Chris Kraft. He was sometimes referred to as "the son of Chris Kraft."
Lunney worked both in the Control Center and at remote sites; during the flight of John Glenn, America's first orbital spaceflight, he was serving as the FIDO in Bermuda. In September 1961, NASA's Space Task Group was reorganized into the Manned Spacecraft Center and moved to Houston, Texas, and Lunney moved with it. In Houston, he became head of the Mission Logic and Computer Hardware section, where he defined and oversaw the computing and display requirements of the flight dynamics division within the new Mission Control Center.
Gemini was a step forward for NASA's human spaceflight program: the Gemini capsule was larger and more advanced than Mercury, capable of supporting two men for up to a two-week mission. Because of the longer mission durations, Mission Control began to be staffed in shifts. In 1964, Lunney and Kranz were selected by Kraft to join him and his deputy John Hodge as flight directors. Aged only twenty-eight, Lunney was the youngest of the four.
Lunney was stationed in Bermuda for the uncrewed Gemini 2 mission. He worked backup on Gemini 3, taking charge of the newly established Mission Control Center in Houston, at a time when flights were still controlled from Cape Canaveral in Florida. On Gemini 4, he again was working backup, this time in Florida, supporting the first mission that was controlled entirely from Houston. After spending some time on uncrewed testing for the Apollo program, he returned to work as a flight director on Gemini 9 and Gemini 11 and lead flight director on, Gemini 10 and Gemini 12.
As with Project Mercury, Lunney was involved in Project Apollo right from the beginning. He took charge of the "boilerplate" tests of the Apollo abort escape system at White Sands, which took place during the Gemini program, and was flight director during the first uncrewed Saturn V test flight, SA-501.
Lunney was not scheduled to serve as a flight director on the first crewed Apollo mission, later known as Apollo 1. During the countdown demonstration test that resulted in the Apollo 1 fire, Lunney was at home having dinner with astronaut Bill Anders and his wife, and was called into Mission Control when the fire occurred. It was, as he recalled, "a tremendous punch in the stomach to all of us".
The aftermath of the fire, in which three astronauts were killed, left Lunney and his colleagues at NASA feeling that they had perhaps failed to recognize the risks they were running in their efforts to meet Kennedy's timetable of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade and bringing him safely back to Earth. "Maybe," said Lunney over thirty years later, "we had gotten a little overconfident".
Lunney attracted significant media attention in 1968, when he worked as lead flight director on Apollo 7, the first of the crewed Apollo flights. Coming as it did after the Apollo 1 fire, the mission was an important test for the Apollo program, and was stressful for astronauts and controllers alike. Lunney had primary responsibility for dealing with the mission commander, Wally Schirra, who repeatedly questioned orders from the ground. Although pressed by reporters in news conferences, Lunney stayed diplomatic and said nothing critical of Schirra.
Privately, however, he was exasperated, and later assured his team of young controllers that "manned spaceflight is usually better than this". He was diplomatic about Donn Eisele's sarcastic comment to the CAPCOM that he would "like to meet the man, or whomever it was, that dreamed up that little gem." The "gem" turned out to be Lunney's.
As a flight director Lunney was known for his good memory and his unusually quick thought processes—traits that could sometimes prove problematic for his team of flight controllers. "Glynn would drive you crazy", said Jay Greene, a fellow controller, "because his mind would race so fast that he could churn out action items quicker than you could absorb, much less answer." He was the lead flight director again during the Apollo 10 mission, a dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 Moon landing.