Bryan Lunney (born January 12, 1966) is an American aerospace engineer and former NASA

flight director Flight controllers are personnel who aid space flight by working in such Mission Control Centers as NASA's Mission Control Center or ESA's European Space Operations Centre. Flight controllers work at computer consoles and use telemetry t ...

Early life

The son of Apollo-era flight director Glynn Lunney (1936–2021), Bryan Lunney grew up in Friendswood, Texas, and attended Friendswood High School. He graduated from Texas A&M University in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science degree in

Aerospace Engineering Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is si ...

NASA career

After graduation, Lunney took a job at NASA's

Johnson Space Center The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) is NASA's center for human spaceflight (originally named the Manned Spacecraft Center), where human spaceflight training, research, and flight control are conducted. It was renamed in honor of the late U ...

. He worked in Mission Control as a Propulsion Engineer before moving to become head of the Motion Control Systems Group, a flight control position associated with the International Space Station. At the time of his father's death in 2021, they were the first and only multi-generational flight directors to have served NASA. In January, 2001, Lunney was appointed a

. He was on duty during the Expedition 4 mission when the International Space Station's computers failed, leaving the station's

gyroscopes A gyroscope (from Ancient Greek γῦρος ''gŷros'', "round" and σκοπέω ''skopéō'', "to look") is a device used for measuring or maintaining orientation and angular velocity. It is a spinning wheel or disc in which the axis of rotat ...

without the information they needed in order to hold the station's attitude stable. Lunney led controllers in creating a primitive but effective temporary solution to the problem, having the crew control the attitude of the space station based on their observations of the Sun's position. He said later that “I felt like a fireman who’d walked out of a burning house having just rescued the kids from the bedroom.” Lunney also worked as a flight director on Expedition 11, and as the Planning/Orbit 3 flight director on the STS-115 mission in September 2006.Mission Overview Briefing Materials (STS-115)
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Personal life

Lunney and his wife, the former Amori Syptak, have three children, Christopher, Macy, and Drake.

Footnotes

References

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Lunney, Bryan American aerospace engineers NASA flight controllers Texas A&M University alumni People from Friendswood, Texas Living people 1966 births Engineers from Texas