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Milt Windler, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13, dies at 94
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.
“Apollo was such a rapid pace that I don’t think people had the chance to think about it very much. 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. “You’d do a mission and then you’d immediately turn around and get ready for another mission.”
“It was not [a] time for reflection,” Windler said.
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.
Realizing this, Windler, working with his wife, Betty, and other flight controllers’ spouses, secretly prepared a batch of small red and blue flannel banners, each with the numeral “1” in white at their center. He planned to distribute the flags to the members of his Maroon team to wave at TLI as a not-so-subtle message to their space race adversaries.
“However, it was decided that this display was inappropriate, especially since the mission was only half over,” wrote Windler in a 2020 letter accompanying one of the flags that had since been acquired by a collector. “Consequently, the flags were never displayed during the mission and American flags were used at the time of a successful landing on Earth.”
Later, Windler and all of his colleagues in Mission Control were provided with a dramatic reminder about why you do not celebrate until the crew has stepped onto their recovery ship. For Apollo 13, Windler was named lead flight director.