FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond
By Gene Kranz
Simon & Schuster, 415 pages, $26
It was a pep talk for the ages. Gene Kranz, flight director for the stricken Apollo 13 spacecraft, gathered NASA controllers around him and told them:
“OK, listen up. When you leave this room, you must leave believing that this crew is coming home. I don’t give a damn about the odds, and I don’t give a damn that we’ve never done anything like this before. Flight control will never lose an American in space. You’ve got to believe, your people have got to believe, that this crew is coming home. Now let’s get going.”
This was the ultimate space-age crisis of the years before the Challenger disaster, the moment when Houston really had a problem. But the crew of Apollo 13 persevered and prevailed, and Kranz and his controllers brought the men home. It is the story of America: a can-do attitude, an ideology of daring, a challenge met with technology.
Now Kranz, who joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1960, and was assistant flight director for Project Mercury and flight director for the first lunar landing, has written a memoir of an era and an idea that are fast receding into the mists but that, in many ways, represented the best of us — and the best use of our idealism and our instinctive fascination with machines.
Kranz has provided a workmanlike chronicle of America’s reach into space — and a flight controller’s view of the drama inherent in sitting behind a console trying to figure out whether a launch should occur, whether a mission would continue, whether lives could be saved.
Through these pages stroll — streak would be a better word — such figures as Alan B. Shepard, Gus Grissom, M. Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, L. Gordon Cooper, Donald Slayton. They were the flyboys of space. Kranz and his colleagues were behind them, doing back-of-the-envelope calculations.
This was experimental science, and no one involved in it ever thought otherwise. There was care, there was attention to detail, but mostly space flight, especially in the early days, involved risk. There was risk every day, every mission, from Shepard’s brief brush with space in his Mercury capsule to Apollo 13’s terrifying brush with death in its aborted mission to the moon.
When an explosion imperiled the astronauts aboard Apollo 13, Kranz and his controllers battled the limits of their knowledge, experience and expectations.
“The frustration of the crew and controllers was starting to creep into their voices,” he writes. “Everything we knew about our spacecraft, all that we had learned about the design, precluded the kind of massive failures we were seeing.” Even so, it was indisputable that an oxygen tank had exploded aboard the spacecraft 200,000 miles from the Earth (and 45,000 miles from the surface of the moon) and that more than the success of the mission was in danger.
In the end, Kranz brought the men home. “We — crew, contractors, controllers — had done the impossible,” Kranz writes. “The human factor had carried the day.” His chronicle is the story of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and of the human factor that made them possible and made them work.
