Mercury Only a month after Lunney graduated, President Eisenhower signed into existence the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), into which NACA was subsumed. His timing was perfect, for as Lunney later said, "there was no such thing as space flight until the month I got out of college". 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. Aged twenty-one, he was the youngest of the forty-five members of the group. His first assignment was with the Control Center Simulation Group, which planned the simulations used to train both
flight controllers and astronauts for the as-yet unknown experience of human spaceflight. and Jones Roach during
Gemini 3 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. He took part in the writing of the first set of mission rules, the guidelines by which both flight controllers and astronauts operated. During Mercury, Lunney became, after
Tecwyn Roberts, the second man to serve as the
Flight Dynamics Officer (FIDO) in the
Mercury Control Center, controlling the trajectory of the spacecraft and planning adjustments to it. 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". It was during these years that Lunney became the protege of flight director
Chris Kraft.
Apollo–Soyuz Test Program 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. "For me it was out of the clear blue sky", said Lunney, who was told of the plans while at a conference in early October. "I did not know anything about [the proposed talks] until that time." The trip took place in late October. While in Moscow, Lunney gave a presentation to Soviet engineers on the techniques that NASA used for orbital rendezvous, and on the compromises that would have to be made in order to achieve a rendezvous between American and Soviet spacecraft. The technical agreement that he helped to draft laid the groundwork for the mission which was to become the
Apollo–Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). It was intended to be a joint mission, whose highlight was to be a docking between an American Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet
Soyuz. Lunney was named technical director of the ASTP in the following year. 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. He also took part in working groups in Houston that dealt with the technical details of the project. A
New York Times profile reported that he was taking Russian lessons in order to be better prepared for the role. 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. In 1973, Lunney became manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, a position which gave him responsibility for the Apollo spacecraft used during
Skylab missions, as well giving him more authority in his role as head of the ASTP. The ASTP mission took place in July 1975. It was criticized by some journalists as a "costly space circus", who felt that it wasted NASA funds that could have been better spent on projects such as Skylab. 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.
Space Shuttle After the ASTP mission was completed, Lunney became manager of the Shuttle Payload Integration and Development Program. During this period, it was anticipated that NASA's space shuttle fleet would be flying very frequent missions, and carrying commercial payloads as well as flying missions for government organizations such as the
Department of Defense and the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The payload integration program was responsible for determining how the various demands of these customers could be satisfied, and how mixed payloads could best be physically accommodated within the cargo bay of the shuttle. During these years Lunney also spent time working at NASA Headquarters in
Washington, D.C., as Deputy Associate Administrator for Space Flight and later as Acting Associate Administrator for Space Transportation Operations. Many of his colleagues had expected Lunney to succeed his mentor, Kraft, as director of
Johnson Space Center; Neil Hutchinson, a fellow flight director, later commented that Lunney "was sort of the anointed one". However, when Kraft retired in 1982, former Apollo flight director
Gerry Griffin was offered the position instead. 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. Although he had retired from NASA the year before, he was called to testify before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology in the aftermath of the
Challenger accident. 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. 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. ==Career at Rockwell==