Milt Windler, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13, dies at 94
Milt Windler, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13, dies at 94
曾协助拯救阿波罗 13 号的 NASA 飞行主管米尔特·温德勒去世，享年 94 岁
Milt Windler, one of the four leaders of Mission Control who in 1970 directed the round-the-clock efforts to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth safely, has died at the age of 94. Windler died on Thursday, surrounded by his loving family, according to a brief notice posted online. 米尔特·温德勒（Milt Windler）是任务控制中心的四位领导人之一。1970 年，他曾指挥团队昼夜不停地工作，最终将阿波罗 13 号的宇航员安全带回地球。据网上发布的一则简短公告显示，温德勒于周四在挚爱家人的陪伴下离世，享年 94 岁。
Named a NASA flight director in 1968 after working on recovery operations during the Mercury and Gemini programs, Windler also led a shift of flight controllers for the Apollo 8 first circumlunar flight and Apollo 10 lunar landing dress rehearsal, as well as the second, third and fourth moon landings — Apollo 12, Apollo 14 and Apollo 15. He then served as a flight director for all three crewed missions to the United States’ first space station, Skylab. 温德勒曾在水星计划和双子座计划期间从事回收工作，并于 1968 年被任命为 NASA 飞行主管。他还曾带领飞行控制团队执行了阿波罗 8 号首次绕月飞行任务、阿波罗 10 号登月预演，以及第二次、第三次和第四次登月任务（阿波罗 12 号、14 号和 15 号）。随后，他担任了美国首个空间站“天空实验室”（Skylab）全部三次载人任务的飞行主管。
“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,” said Windler in a 2006 oral history interview for the University of North Texas. “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,” Windler said. “阿波罗计划的节奏太快了，我认为人们根本没有机会去多想。直到后来我才愈发清晰地意识到，我们当时正在创造历史，”温德勒在 2006 年为北德克萨斯大学所做的口述历史采访中说道。“你刚完成一个任务，紧接着就要转头为下一个任务做准备。”温德勒说：“那根本不是反思的时候。”
Maroon Flight
“栗色飞行”团队 (Maroon Flight)
Each flight director chose a team name (at first colors). As the seventh person to be appointed to the position — and one of the first two to be selected from outside of the flight operations team — Windler became “Maroon Flight.” 每位飞行主管都会选择一个团队名称（起初通常是颜色）。作为第七位被任命为该职位的负责人，同时也是首批两位从飞行操作团队之外选拔出的主管之一，温德勒选择了“栗色飞行”（Maroon Flight）作为代号。
On his first mission at the flight director’s console, Windler was assigned to the third shift, putting him at the head of the operations control room when it was time to send the first humans beyond Earth orbit. The trans-lunar injection, or TLI, burn placed Apollo 8 crew members Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell on a trajectory to advance the United States ahead of the Soviet Union by becoming the first nation to orbit people around the moon. 在温德勒首次担任飞行主管的岗位上，他被分配到第三班次。当任务进入将人类送往地球轨道之外的关键时刻，他成为了操作控制室的负责人。地月转移轨道（TLI）点火将阿波罗 8 号机组成员弗兰克·博尔曼（Frank Borman）、比尔·安德斯（Bill Anders）和吉姆·洛威尔（Jim Lovell）送上了轨道，使美国领先于苏联，成为第一个实现载人绕月飞行的国家。
Realizing this, Windler, working with his wife, Betty, and other flight controllers’ spouses, secretly prepared a batch of small red and blue flannel banners, each with the numeral “1” in white at their center. He planned to distribute the flags to the members of his Maroon team to wave at TLI as a not-so-subtle message to their space race adversaries. 意识到这一点后，温德勒与他的妻子贝蒂（Betty）以及其他飞行控制员的配偶秘密制作了一批红色和蓝色的小法兰绒旗帜，每面旗帜中央都印有白色的数字“1”。他计划将这些旗帜分发给“栗色”团队的成员，在 TLI 点火时挥舞，以此向太空竞赛的对手传递一个并不含蓄的信号。
“However, it was decided that this display was inappropriate, especially since the mission was only half over,” wrote Windler in a 2020 letter accompanying one of the flags that had since been acquired by a collector. “Consequently, the flags were never displayed during the mission and American flags were used at the time of a successful landing on Earth.” “然而，大家认为这种展示是不合适的，尤其是当时任务才进行了一半，”温德勒在 2020 年的一封信中写道，这封信随附在后来被收藏家收购的一面旗帜旁。“因此，这些旗帜在任务期间从未展示过，而在成功返回地球时，使用的是美国国旗。”
Later, Windler and all of his colleagues in Mission Control were provided with a dramatic reminder about why you do not celebrate until the crew has stepped onto their recovery ship. For Apollo 13, Windler was named lead flight director. 后来，温德勒和任务控制中心的所有同事都得到了一个深刻的教训：在宇航员踏上回收船之前，绝不能提前庆祝。在阿波罗 13 号任务中，温德勒被任命为首席飞行主管。
“What that meant was you did the ascent — the liftoff from Earth, I should say, the launch — and you did the lunar surface activity,” he told the UNT interviewer. “But then, of course, after we lifted off from the Earth, when we got more toward the moon, why, the whole mission changed.” “这意味着你要负责上升段——也就是从地球起飞，或者说发射——以及月球表面的活动，”他在接受北德克萨斯大学采访时说。“但当然，在我们离开地球、向月球靠近的过程中，整个任务发生了变化。”
An explosion tore through the Apollo 13 service module, crippling the spacecraft and venting the crew’s oxygen supply into space. Instead of overseeing the third time humans had walked on the moon, Windler — together with Gold Flight, Gerry Griffin — polled the flight controllers in the room to develop three options for when, where and how long to fire the lunar module’s engine to put the Apollo 13 spacecraft on a path back to Earth. 一场爆炸摧毁了阿波罗 13 号的服务舱，导致航天器受损，宇航员的氧气供应泄漏到太空中。温德勒没有去监督人类第三次登月，而是与“金色飞行”（Gold Flight）主管格里·格里芬（Gerry Griffin）一起，召集控制室内的飞行控制员，制定了三种方案，以决定何时、何地以及点火多久来启动登月舱发动机，从而让阿波罗 13 号航天器重返地球轨道。
It would not be the last time Windler was involved in re-planning a mission already underway, but not because something had gone awry. As flight director during the Skylab missions, the challenge was working with emerging scientific events. 这并不是温德勒最后一次参与正在进行中的任务重规划，但后续并非因为出现了故障。在“天空实验室”任务期间，作为飞行主管，他面临的挑战是如何应对突发的科学事件。
“We had to come up with a system that would allow us to plan in real time and accommodate the science people. If something interesting happened on the sun, which it did several times, then we needed to be able to schedule the ATM [Apollo Telescope Mount] work,” he said in 2006. “We invented a way of flight planning in real time, or cycles,” said Windler, where one day the science people talked about what they wanted to do, and the ‘Science Czar’ got with them and said, ‘All right, then, we need these particular objectives for tomorrow.’” “我们必须想出一套系统，让我们能够实时规划并满足科学家的需求。如果太阳上发生了有趣的现象（这种情况发生过好几次），我们就需要能够安排阿波罗望远镜支架（ATM）的工作，”他在 2006 年说道。“我们发明了一种实时飞行规划或周期规划的方法，”温德勒说，即科学家们在一天内讨论他们想做什么，然后由“科学沙皇”与他们沟通并确定：“好吧，那么明天我们需要完成这些特定的目标。”
After the Skylab missions ended, Windler went to work on the space shuttle and the development of the remote manipulator system or “Canadarm,” the winged orbiters’ robotic arm contributed to the program by Canada. He then retired from NASA and joined private industry to work on what would become the International Space Station, consulting on the operations aspect of the orbiting laboratory, and later, as modules were produced, on some of the verification procedures. “天空实验室”任务结束后，温德勒转而投身于航天飞机项目，参与了遥控机械臂系统（即“加拿大臂”）的开发，这是加拿大为该项目贡献的机械臂。随后，他从 NASA 退休并加入私营企业，参与了后来成为国际空间站的项目，为轨道实验室的运营提供咨询，并在后来模块生产过程中，参与了一些验证程序的工作。
‘Pay more attention’
“多加注意”
Born on Jan. 10, 1932 in Hampton, Virginia, Milton Windler graduated from Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) in 1954 with a degree in aeronautical engineering. He joined the U.S. Air Force’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) while still in school and then worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA’s predecessor. 米尔顿·温德勒于 1932 年 1 月 10 日出生在弗吉尼亚州汉普顿，1954 年毕业于弗吉尼亚理工大学（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学），获得航空工程学位。他在校期间加入了美国空军预备役军官训练团（ROTC），随后进入 NASA 的前身——美国国家航空咨询委员会（NACA）工作。