[7] Cooperative students at NACA took part in a program that combined work and study, providing a way for them to fund their college degrees while gaining experience in aeronautics.

[9] Only a month after Lunney graduated, President Eisenhower signed into existence the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), into which NACA was subsumed.

[10] Lunney was soon transferred to Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where in September 1959 he became a member of the Space Task Group, which was the body given responsibility for the creation of NASA's human spaceflight program.

[12] A member of the Flight Operations Division, Lunney was one of the engineers responsible for planning and creating procedures for Project Mercury, America's first human spaceflight program.

[13] Lunney's colleague Gene Kranz described him as "the pioneer leader of trajectory operations, who turned his craft from an art practiced by a few into a pure science".

"[14] Lunney worked both in the Control Center and at remote sites; during the flight of John Glenn, America's first orbital spaceflight, he was serving as the FIDO in Bermuda.

[23] The aftermath of the fire, in which three astronauts were killed, left Lunney and his colleagues at NASA feeling that they had perhaps failed to recognize the risks they were running in their efforts to meet Kennedy's timetable of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade and bringing him safely back to Earth.

[28] "Glynn would drive you crazy", said Jay Greene, a fellow controller, "because his mind would race so fast that he could churn out action items quicker than you could absorb, much less answer.

Ken Mattingly, the astronaut who had been bumped from the Apollo 13 crew due to his exposure to German measles, later called Lunney's performance "the most magnificent display of personal leadership that I've ever seen.

[2][32] In 1970, while still a flight director, Lunney was selected as one of the members of a NASA delegation to the Soviet Union, which was to discuss the possibility of cooperation between the two countries in the field of human spaceflight.

As technical director, he made several more trips to the Soviet Union, helping to negotiate the seventeen-point agreement that would govern the conduct of the mission.

[36] On June 13, 1972, Lunney was given overall responsibility for the test project; henceforth he would be in charge not only of building a partnership with the Soviets, but also of mission planning and of negotiating with North American Rockwell, the spacecraft contractor.

According to the official history of the ASTP, Lunney's performance during Apollo 13 and during the Soviet negotiations had recommended him to Chris Kraft, who was by then director of Johnson Space Center.

[39] However, Lunney supported the project, saying in a later interview that he did not believe the cooperation necessary to build the International Space Station would have been possible if ASTP had not laid the groundwork for it.

During the earlier shuttle flights he was involved in determining whether the weather was suitable for launch, but in later years that responsibility was largely devolved to lower levels of the hierarchy.

[43] In 1985, Lunney decided to leave NASA, feeling that the Space Shuttle program had worn him out physically and mentally and that he was ready for a new type of challenge.

While still manager of the shuttle program, he had signed the "Criticality 1" waiver that allowed Challenger to launch even though the joints of its solid rocket boosters had recently been redefined as non-redundant systems.

[45] His actions were not unusual in the context of NASA practice at the time, which allowed a "walk through" of such potentially controversial waivers if no debate was expected.

[46] Upon leaving NASA in 1985, Lunney took a position at Rockwell International, the contractor responsible for the construction, operation, and maintenance of the Space Shuttle.

At this point, Lunney became Vice President and Program Manager of the United Space Alliance's spaceflight operations in Houston; he stayed in this position until his retirement in 1999.

[2] During his leisure hours, Lunney enjoyed sailing; during the 1960s the family owned a twenty-foot sailboat which they took out on Galveston Bay, and he occasionally dreamed of going with his wife and children on an ocean cruise lasting for months.

As a manager, he inspired his employees to do their best work and offered direction and encouragement to his team when challenges arose; as an explorer, he always looked toward the future and saw the endless possibilities and benefits of man's journey into space.

"[1] In 2008 he received the Elmer A. Sperry Award, jointly with Thomas P. Stafford, Alexey Leonov and Konstantin Bushuyev, for their work on the Apollo–Soyuz mission and the Apollo–Soyuz docking interface design.

"Without slighting Kranz's role", Murray commented, "the world should remember that it was Glynn Lunney ... who orchestrated a masterpiece of improvisation that moved the astronauts safely to the lunar module while sidestepping a dozen potential catastrophes that could have doomed them.