FAILURE WAS NOT AN OPTION
Longtime flight director Gene Kranz personified NASA’s Apollo mantra
Gene Kranz didn’t set out
to be a writer of thrillers. But moments in his memoir ring with the tension of a white-knuckle novel. Take this passage, as NASA prepared for the Apollo 11 moon landing:
“If there was one word guaranteed to get your attention in Mission Control, it is the word ‘abort.’ This word is never used casually and literally rings across the voice loops as the word is passed to the crew, computer controllers and support personnel. … In an abort your chances of getting out
alive are good if the abort is done at the right time. If you are off the timeline, your chances are not good 200,000 miles away from home.”
The brilliant and level-headed people working in Mission Control during the Apollo program are often treated as a hive mind, and in defense of that presentation: They worked as a remarkably complex collective of complementary parts. None of them had their work marked by largescale parades the way some of the astronauts did. But the stakes were nevertheless high in their work, and the burden of lives on the line fell on their shoulders.
Which is why the deaths of three astronauts during a test exercise for what became known as Apollo 1 weighed heavily on all involved.
And Kranz defined a philosophy for NASA going forward from that tragedy. “Tough and competent” was his mantra, part of a pledge to push forward to the moon but in a manner meticulously calibrated to maximize the safety of the men on top of all that rocket fuel.
Kranz emerged as something of a star among this set of Mission Control principals in a roundabout way. He possessed — and still possesses — a magnetic military manner; he knows well the dramatic sound of his voice. But Kranz’s renown as a
face of 1960s Mission Control also owes some debt to “Apollo 13,” Ron Howard’s feature film that cast a stern and charismatic Ed Harris as Kranz.
That film’s “Failure is not an option” was hatched through a writer’s creative license of something different Kranz had said, and it became a ubiquitous phrase. So much so that Kranz used it as the title of his 2000 memoir.
But Kranz gives the impression of a man whose manner prior, during and following Apollo 13 was consistent.
When I spoke to Kranz a few years ago, he downplayed this remarkable work.
“We had a job to do,” he said simply. But Kranz speaks with a touch of Midwestern grit for effect.
’I always wanted to fly’
Kranz grew up in Toledo, Ohio. There he demonstrated an interest in flight and spaceflight early.
“I always wanted to fly,” he wrote in his memoir. “I had my head in the clouds and my heart followed.”
Kranz studied aeronautical engineering in college and then joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He was stationed in Korea, where he received an aircontrol assignment — demanding and tense groundwork that emphasized preparation and precision. Like plenty of other Americans, he felt a twinge of anxiety when Russia launched its Sputnik satellite into space.
Kranz’s next orders sent him to Oklahoma to train with jet tankers, which he found a problematic assignment. Kranz requested his discharge from active duty, and he eventually began working for McDonnell Aircraft. He was recruited for the Mercury space program, which initiated Kranz’s long tenure at NASA.
By then he was married to Marta Cadena, whom he met while stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in Bexar County. Marta started sewing waistcoats for Kranz with the Gemini 4 mission, and Kranz began wearing a new vest with each mission. The Smithsonian Institution now has his Apollo 13 vest.
Prior to that, Kranz served as flight director for the Apollo 11 lunar landing, which meant he was in Mission Control as Eagle approached the surface of the moon with its fuel swiftly depleting.
At that point, Kranz suggested Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were “going for broke,” according to James R. Hansen’s Armstrong bio “First Man.” “I had this feeling ever since they took over manual control,” Kranz said. “They are the right ones for the job. I crossed myself and said, ‘Please, God.’ ”
Kranz’s renown would grow with the tense return of Apollo 13, in which an oxygen tank exploded and the complexity of the Apollo missions was again laid bare.
Kranz never uttered, “Failure is not an option.” When he was interviewed by screenwriters Bill Broyles and Al Reinert, who were working on the screenplay, he offered some variation of the phrase.
Broyles took a spoken thought and turned it into poetry.
“Look, the guy was remarkable at working under pressure,” said Reinert, who died in 2018. “Maybe it’s Hollywood-y, but that line fit that character.”
A new project
Kranz is now 85 and long retired. But he retained a sense of pride in what he and his colleagues did with the Apollo program. So in 2016, he found the state of MOCR2, the Mission Control room that served as the terrestrial hive mind for the Apollo missions, to be in inexcusably poor condition.
In his dramatic voice, Kranz described the room, its history and its status.
“This is a place of history,” he said. “But what I see is a tired Mission Control, worn of its heart and soul. It’s time to start the battle for its restoration.”
And so began a project to lift stained carpet, replace flickering light bulbs and return the room to regal status, a mission that should be completed in time for the 50th anniversary in July of the moon landing.
On the one hand, Kranz’s efforts to draw attention to a national monument in disrepair felt like an urgent contemporary issue. On the other, it felt like the flight director doing what he did years ago — assessing a situation that needed action and figuring out the best course of action.
“Tough and competent” became a much-circulated NASA phrase after Apollo 1 and stuck around through the program. And it has since become known as “The Kranz Dictum.”