Milt Windler, Apollo 13 Flight Director, Dies at 94

Milt Windler, one of four NASA flight directors who oversaw the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew in 1970, died Thursday at age 94, according to a brief notice cited by Ars Technica. He died surrounded by family, the notice said.

Who was Milt Windler?

NASA named Windler a flight director in 1968, making him the seventh person to hold the position and one of the first two selected from outside the agency's flight operations team, per Ars Technica's reporting. He had worked on recovery operations during the earlier Mercury and Gemini programs before moving to the console in Houston's Mission Control Center.

What role did he play in Apollo 13?

Windler served as lead flight director for Apollo 13 in April 1970, the mission in which an oxygen tank ruptured en route to the moon and forced the crew into a four-day improvised return. As lead, Windler's responsibilities included the ascent phase — the liftoff — according to the account in Ars Technica's obituary. The mission remains the reference point for his career, cited in the headline of the original report.

Which other Apollo and Skylab missions did he lead?

Beyond Apollo 13, Windler led a shift of flight controllers for Apollo 8, the first crewed flight to circle the moon in 1968, and for Apollo 10, the lunar-landing dress rehearsal in 1969, Ars Technica reported. He also directed shifts during three moon landings — Apollo 12, Apollo 14 and Apollo 15 — then moved to the flight director's chair for all three crewed missions to Skylab, the first U.S. space station. That span covers five Apollo flights and three Skylab missions across roughly seven years of console time, 1968 to the mid-1970s, based on the mission list in the Ars Technica account.

Why was he called "Maroon Flight"?

Each flight director picked a team color; Windler's was maroon. On his first mission at the console — the third shift for Apollo 8's trans-lunar injection burn — Windler and his wife, Betty, along with other controllers' spouses, secretly sewed small red-and-blue flannel banners marked with the numeral "1," intending to wave them at the moment the U.S. pulled ahead of the Soviet Union in the race to orbit the moon, according to Ars Technica. NASA decided the display was "inappropriate" with the mission only half complete, Windler wrote in a 2020 letter accompanying one of the surviving flags, later obtained by a collector. American flags were used instead after a successful splashdown.

What did Windler say about his place in space history?

In a 2006 oral-history interview for the University of North Texas, cited by Ars Technica, Windler described the pace of the Apollo program as too fast for reflection at the time. "Apollo was such a rapid pace that I don't think people had the chance to think about it very much," he said. "It has only become more clear to me later on that we were making history." He added that mission turnaround left little room to pause: "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."