Milt Windler, one of the four leaders of Mission Control who in 1970 directed the round-the-clock efforts to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth safely, has died at the age of 94. Windler died on Thursday, surrounded by his loving family, according to a brief notice posted online. Named a NASA flight director in 1968 after working on recovery operations during the Mercury and Gemini programs, Windler also led a shift of flight controllers for the Apollo 8 first circumlunar flight and Apollo 10 lunar landing dress rehearsal, as well as the second, third and fourth moon landings — Apollo 12, Apollo 14 and Apollo 15.
He then served as a flight director for all three crewed missions to the United States’ first space station, Skylab. It has only become more clear to me later on that we were making history,” said Windler in a 2006 oral history interview for the University of North Texas. Each flight director chose a team name (at first colors).
As the seventh person to be appointed to the position — and one of the first two to be selected from outside of the flight operations team — Windler became “Maroon Flight.” On his first mission at the flight director’s console, Windler was assigned to the third shift, putting him at the head of the operations control room when it was time to send the first humans beyond Earth orbit. The trans-lunar injection, or TLI, burn placed Apollo 8 crew members Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell on a trajectory to advance the United States ahead of the Soviet Union by becoming the first nation to orbit people around the moon.
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