Paul Haney, voice of NASA mission control

Mr. Haney had been battling melanoma for more than two years, and it had spread to his brain, according to the Alamogordo Funeral Home.

After almost five years as a reporter for the Washington Evening Star, Mr. Haney joined the recently created NASA in 1958 as a public information officer.

His first task, he recalled in 2003 for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, was to "try to figure out what a public information officer should do." Mainly, he thought, it was to cut through bureaucracy and be as open as possible.

In 1963, Mr. Haney was promoted to chief of public affairs at the Manned Spacecraft Center, which eventually became the Johnson Space Center, in Houston. He took on the additional duty of providing commentary from mission control that was fed to television viewers.

He covered multiple flights during the Gemini program, which consisted of two-man missions designed to bridge the gap between the founding Mercury program and the Apollo program, which first sent people to the moon.

Among the historic - and tense - moments Mr. Haney narrated for the public was Apollo 8's arrival at the moon on Christmas Eve of 1968. The world waited as the spacecraft went behind the far side of the moon into a communications blackout, after which it would be known whether the crew had successfully entered the moon's orbit.

After minutes of silence, Mr. Haney exclaimed: "We got it! We've got it! Apollo 8 now in lunar orbit."

Paul Prichard Haney was born July 20, 1928, in Akron, Ohio. To pay his way through Ohio's Kent State University, he worked nights for the Associated Press. He started at the Star after Navy service during the Korean War.

He said in the 2003 oral history that his experience covering space before taking the NASA job was largely limited to a man-on-the street piece he did for the Star after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957.

Among Mr. Haney's early responsibilities at the agency was introducing its first crop of astronauts, dubbed the "Mercury Seven," at an event at the Dolley Madison House in Washington. But his job also required overseeing the press component of several NASA accidents, including a 1965 plane crash that killed two Gemini crew members in St. Louis and a 1967 fire on the pad of Apollo 1 that killed three astronauts.

Mr. Haney repeatedly clashed with agency administrators.

"He believed it should all be open," Bill Johnson, who worked for Mr. Haney at NASA, told The New York Times. "That was his conflict with the other branches of NASA."

One clash in spring 1969 was with Donald K. Slayton, known as Deke, the astronaut who then was head of the astronaut office, over access to a lunar landing practice session by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Some NASA officials did not want reporters present. Mr. Haney did. In a compromise, Armstrong and Aldrin performed the session twice, once for the officials and once for journalists.

Johnson said Mr. Haney profusely thanked the astronauts, who were exhausted by the end of the day, but said the incident was "the straw that broke the camel's back."

Mr. Haney chose to quit NASA in 1969 rather than be reassigned.

He told the Washington Post in April that year that he was especially bitter that he would miss the first lunar landing, July 20.

"That'll hurt like hell," Mr. Haney said. "The landing is supposed to happen on my birthday."

The rest of Mr. Haney's career included doing NASA commentary for Independent Television News in London and writing for the Economist magazine and the Evening Post in Charleston, S.C.

He and his wife bought a cherry orchard in New Mexico.

His marriage to the former Jane Bramley ended in divorce. Mr. Haney leaves his wife, Janet; two daughters, Maura Ford and Megan Reeves, both of El Dorado Hills, Calif.; a stepson, Richard Shrum of El Paso; a sister, Mary Wilson of Stow, Ohio; and seven grandchildren.

Material from The New York Times was used in this obituary.