Milt Windler, one of the four NASA flight directors who guided the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth after an explosion crippled their spacecraft in 1970, died on Thursday. He was 94, [collectSPACE reported](http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-100326a-milton-windler-apollo-flight-director-obituary.html), and word of his death came Friday in an obituary on Ars Technica.

Mr. Windler was part of the Mission Control leadership on Apollo 13, the mission that became NASA’s most celebrated rescue after an oxygen tank blew out on the way to the moon. In 1970, President Richard M. Nixon presented the flight directors and controllers with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. Mr. Windler also received NASA’s Exceptional Service Medal.

He later served as a flight director for the Skylab missions of the mid-1970s, where the science agenda ran around the clock. “We had to come up with a system that would allow us to plan in real time and accommodate the science people,” he recalled in 2006, of scheduling the station’s Apollo Telescope Mount. “We invented a way of flight planning in real time, or cycles,” he said, describing how a “Science Czar” would settle the objectives for each coming day.

After Skylab, Mr. Windler worked on the space shuttle program and on the development of the remote manipulator system, the robotic arm contributed by Canada that astronauts nicknamed Canadarm. He retired from NASA for private industry, consulting on operations for what became the International Space Station and later on verification procedures as its modules were built.

Milton Windler was born on Jan. 10, 1932, in Hampton, Va. He graduated from Virginia Tech in 1954 with a degree in aeronautical engineering, having joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps while in school. He worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NASA’s predecessor, served four years in the Air Force and returned to NACA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, staying through its transformation into a NASA facility. He moved to Houston as the Manned Spacecraft Center, now the Johnson Space Center, was being set up.

Mr. Windler and his wife, Betty Selby Windler, had three children and eight grandchildren. A memorial service is planned in the coming weeks at the family’s former church in Friendswood, Texas, according to the Ars Technica obituary.

Asked once what he would do differently, Mr. Windler answered, “If I did it again, I’d probably try to do something more about trying to pay more attention.” The missions, he said, came at him “bang-bang-bang.” “You couldn’t enjoy, really, in a way you couldn’t savor it, like maybe it would have been better to have done.”