Biography

A flight director at NASA's Johnson Space Center for the historic Apollo 11 mission, Lunney was also among the team that saved the astronauts aboard the crippled Apollo 13 mission a year later.

After two years at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, he transferred to the University of Detroit (now the University of Detroit Mercy), where he studied engineering and took part in a cooperative training program with the forerunner of NASA. He joined the space agency after he graduated.

His father was a coal miner and welder.

He joined the US space program in 1958 and helped develop the Mercury spacecraft used in the first crewed flights in the early 1960s. He had a major role in the Gemini and Apollo programs. He was technical director of the Apollo-Soyuz project in 1975, and worked on the Skylab and space shuttle projects before leaving NASA in 1985. He worked for Rockwell International and United Space Alliance until his retirement.

They didn't give me credit for any of the work that I did. As a matter of fact, if you watch the movie, you'll see I'm sort of portrayed as a flunky. [regarding his portrayal in the movie Apollo 13]