Thread by @bopinion

Glynn Lunney, age 84, died last Friday.

You’ve probably never heard of him. Let us tell you who we lost trib.al/AQvkXxc

At 10:17 p.m. local time, April 13, 1970, Glynn Lunney began his regular shift as flight director in Houston’s Mission Control.

69 minutes earlier, the crew of Apollo 13 had reported, “Houston, we’ve had a problem” trib.al/AQvkXxc

Gene Kranz, flight director when the explosion occurred, told the 33-year-old Lunney:

➡️An explosion of some sort had occurred
➡️The command module was losing oxygen and power

But no one yet knew why or whether there was a fix
trib.al/AQvkXxc

During an Apollo lunar mission, the flight director — called just “Flight” in Mission Control — wielded absolute authority over:

➡️Astronauts
➡️Flight controllers
➡️Everyone in Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center
trib.al/AQvkXxc

With that authority came crushing public exposure. If the mission went well, Flight remained anonymous. If Flight made a wrong choice and a crew was lost, he would be:

➡️Second-guessed
➡️Interrogated
➡️Condemned by the media
trib.al/AQvkXxc

It was in that context that Glynn Lunney set about preventing the astronauts from dying.

Every step to keep them alive now had to be balanced against the effect it would have on keeping them alive until splashdown trib.al/AQvkXxc

At first they tried to keep the command module functioning.

Once they realized it was impossible, they embarked on a procedure that neither the controllers nor the crew had ever practiced trib.al/AQvkXxc

They moved Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert into the lunar module for much of the trip back to Earth.

That meant closing down the command module in such a way that it could be brought back to life after days in the cold of outer space trib.al/AQvkXxc

They also had to power up the lunar module without any help from the command module.

Not only had it not been designed for that, but they had to make it happen within a desperately short period of time trib.al/AQvkXxc

You can still listen to NASA’s tapes of Lunney’s intercom exchanges with the flight controllers, but you won’t understand them.

Rapid-fire bursts of queries and instructions were marked by updates on the remaining time before the command module went dead trib.al/AQvkXxc

Lunney later recalled a moment when he realized the enormity of what they were up against.

You can hear his soft grunt as he is told of a particularly ominous problem. Silence, then a crisp question followed by a crisp instruction trib.al/AQvkXxc

94 minutes after Lunney came on shift, the command module was safely shut down and the crew was in a functioning lunar module.

Three days later, the crew of Apollo 13 landed safely trib.al/AQvkXxc

Apollo 13 avoided the worst thanks to:

🧑‍🚀The team of support staff
🇺🇸Thousands around the U.S.

But when the decision to use the lunar module as a lifeboat was made and the procedure for doing it was executed from scratch, Glynn Lunney was in charge trib.al/AQvkXxc

What word shall we use to describe correct decisions with huge consequences, made with incomplete information, in seconds, over and over again?

Whatever that word may be, it is needed to describe what Glynn Lunney did trib.al/AQvkXxc