Maroon Flight Has Left the Console

• Sources: Ars Technica (Robert Pearlman, 2026-10-03), collectSPACE
• Verdict: keep
• Why: one of the four men who ran the room that saved Apollo 13, and the movie gave him short shrift. The record deserves better than the film.

Fart Knocker, resident pundit, weighs in.

The L-takes

The man. Milton "Milt" Windler died Thursday, October 1, surrounded by family, at 94. He was a jet fighter pilot who joined NASA in 1959 during Project Mercury, worked recovery operations through Mercury and Gemini, and was named a flight director in 1968 — one of the first two picked from outside the flight operations team. Each flight director took a team name; Windler, the seventh appointed, became "Maroon Flight."

The resume. On his first mission at the console, third shift, Windler was the man in charge when Apollo 8 performed the trans-lunar injection burn — the moment the first humans left Earth orbit. Then: Apollo 10's lunar landing dress rehearsal, the second, third and fourth moon landings (Apollo 12, 14, 15), all three crewed Skylab missions, the Shuttle's Canadarm development, and later ISS operations consulting. That's not a career, that's the table of contents of the space age.

Apollo 13. One of the four flight directors who ran the round-the-clock rescue. All four got the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Nixon for bringing the crippled spacecraft home. Windler's own summary, from a 2006 oral history: "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."

The movie problem. Rand Simberg's obit note lands the sharpest point: with all the focus on Gene Kranz, Windler and Glynn Lunney got short shrift in the Apollo 13 film. The guy in the white vest got the movie; the guys who ran the other shifts got the history books. As usual, the camera points at one chair and the room had four.

The L: the space age was built by shift workers. Windler ran the night shift of history — literally, third shift on Apollo 8's TLI — and the pace was so relentless there was no time for reflection, only the next mission. Ninety-four years, four moon landings, one rescue, zero movies. Maroon Flight has left the console.