It took only seconds for an electrical glitch to ignite the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the cabin, creating a fire that was virtually a contained explosion. Moments after the first intimation that something had gone terribly wrong, technicians were up in the gantry, desperately trying to open the hatch. In terms of the distances involved in spaceflight, we could almost reach out and touch them.
Each of us had indelible memories of that awful day three years before when three other astronauts sat in an Apollo spacecraft firmly anchored to the ground. Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and BeyondĪt some time in the hours that followed that terse announcement from Apollo 13, many of us in NASA’s Mission Control Center wondered if we were going to lose the crew. This is a fascinating firsthand account written by a veteran mission controller of one of America’s greatest achievements.
He reveals behind-the-scenes details to demonstrate the leadership, discipline, trust, and teamwork that made the space program a success.įinally, Kranz reflects on what has happened to the space program and offers his own bold suggestions about what we ought to be doing in space now. Kranz takes us inside Mission Control and introduces us to some of the whiz kids-still in their twenties, only a few years out of college-who had to figure it all out as they went along, creating a great and daring enterprise. When the space technology failed, as it sometimes did, the controllers’ only recourse was to rely on their skills and those of their teammates. What appeared as nearly flawless missions to the Moon were, in fact, a series of hair-raising near misses. In Failure Is Not an Option, Gene Kranz recounts these thrilling historic events and offers new information about the famous flights. (In the film Apollo 13, Kranz was played by the actor Ed Harris, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance.) He headed the Tiger Team that had to figure out how to bring the three Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth. Kranz was flight director for both Apollo 11, the mission in which Neil Armstrong fulfilled President Kennedy’s pledge, and Apollo 13. Kennedy’s commitment to land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. With his teammates, he accepted the challenge to carry out President John F. He helped to launch Alan Shepard and John Glenn, then assumed the flight director’s role in the Gemini program, which he guided to fruition. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond.
As a flight director in NASA’s Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America’s manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades.
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