Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond Paperback – Illustrated, June 23, 2009

I was first introduced to the idea of Gene Kranz when I first saw the film Apollo 13, and then again shortly after I saw the excellent HBO miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon. I found his steely-eyed, take-no-bull, calm and collected attitude, portrayed by Ed Harris in Apollo 13 and Dan Butler in the HBO series, to be an integral part of the NASA equation.So when this book, Failure is Not an Option, came up as a daily deal from Audible, I jumped on it. I couldn’t have made a better decision. This book is a personal memoir of Kranz, following his career at Nasa through the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. The beginning of the book is a bit awkward, as it starts out immediately with the Mercury program, then provides an entire section on his own background, qualifications and training, then resumes with Gemini. It is a bit jarring at the point where you read it, but once you’re past it, you don’t think of it again.The thing I like the best about this book is how it is not just effusive praise of the astronauts. This by no means diminishes their contribution, but Kranz seems to go out of his way to hammer into your head that everything was a team effort, and there were more people than you could possibly imagine who, working together, raced against the Russians to put a man on the moon. At one point, he says, “Chances are, you’ve never heard of Hal Beck.” This is just one of the many times he goes out of his way to describe the individuals who contributed to his team, praising their worth, their contribution and their ability.Kranz seems selfless to a fault. He says, “I think everyone, once in his life should be given a ticker-tape parade.” I have a feeling the statuary of his controllers are polished with a little extra shine, but you can tell that he is the type of man who wants to make sure that everyone gets recognized. He jokes about how Alan Shepard says, “More people remember that I’m the guy who hit a golf ball on the moon, than that I was the first American in space.” Shift that back a few levels, and try to name any of the Flight Directors other than Kranz, or CAPCOMs that were not former astronauts, and you can see how he wants to make sure people don’t get forgotten.And that’s the beauty of the book. It’s not about the astronauts; it’s about the people at Mission Control. The full name of the book is “Failure is not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond,” and it is absolutely a recounting of the people who make up Mission Control - not the engineers who built the spacecraft, and not the astronauts who flew it - but the people who solved the problems mid-flight and kept everything together. When talking about how his flight director colors were retired, he says the retirement proclamation is “written by one’s peers, the only people who matter in our business.”And problems there were, in spades. Apollo 13 stands out as one of the most celebrated successes pulled from the ashes of failure, but there were many other problems as well. All three Apollo 1 astronauts died before ever leaving the ground. Apollo 11 missed its landing zone by a large margin. Apollo 12 was struck by lightning before it ever left Earth’s atmosphere. It seems every mission had something that went wrong, and the Mission Control people worked the problems and fixed them with incredible efficiency.This book is THEIR story. And it’s a fascinating one.The book was written in 1999, and as such mentions the Challenger disaster, but was well before the Columbia disaster. It also is well before the privatization of space exploration, and the wonderful things being done by SpaceX. I would love to hear what he says about SpaceX, especially as the Afterword laments the current (1999) state of NASA and the country’s commitment to space exploration.Audiobook note: The audiobook was very nicely narrated by Danny Campbell, who does a nice job of making it sound like he knows and believes the technical jargon sprinkled copiously throughout the book. The only negative is his rather poor British accent, which is thankfully kept to a minimum.

Good Condition

Growing up as a kid watching the Gemini and Apollo missions is what first sparked my interest in science and engineering. The other kids wanted to be astronauts; I wanted to be one one the engineers in Mission Control, ideally the flight director. Astronauts went into space once, twice if they were lucky. The engineers in Mission Control got to go on each one (or so it seemed). I wanted to know what it was like to ride into space with a headset, an oscilloscope and a chart recorder. Having to make life and death decisions in seconds or fractions thereof.Gene Kranz's book has finally given me that ride. Kranz tells of space exploration from the controllers viewpoint. And what a view it is, from the 4" flight of Mercury-Redstone 1, to the first Moon landing with Apollo 11 and the death defying flight of Apollo 13 Kranz allows us to live the adventure that he and his fellow controllers lived. The computers of the day were too big to place in the spacecraft. The computers controlling the craft were in Houston and a successful mission meant relaying results and limited code from Houston to the craft and vice versa. Poor decisions could mean a failed mission or worse, dead astronauts. The pressure these men lived under was tremendous but they took it on willingly as they believed in the cause set for them by President Kennedy - To place a man on the moon before the end of the decade. They worked 12 & 16 hour shifts, lived at the Johnson Space Center during missions, skipped vacations for years leading up to that first moon landing. Kranz tells of how the pressure could take a toll on the controllers and their families but the mission always came first. Mission training for both controllers and astronauts began months before the actual mission. Simulations were run to anticipate common and not so common emergencies. And they were run again and again until the right solutions came almost automatically. Much of the pressure would be blown off at informal beer laden mission debriefs at a local biergarten in Webster or by various physical activities. In Kranz's case he took up judo with a couple of other controllers to help blow off steam.Kranz is quite humble about his own role as flight director for Gemini and Apollo. While a believer in strong leadership, his concept of that is someone who provides his team with clear goals and objectives, the tools needed and then gets out of their way. Kranz truly believes in teamwork freely acknowledging that any and all success he had with NASA was due to excellent collaboration of a complex team of astronauts, controllers, contractors and administrators and the support provided by his wife Marta and his Catholic Faith.So why only 4 stars? Let's face it, Kranz writes like he talks - in the short clipped speech of an engineer or better yet a flight director. To be honest, its more like hearing him telling stories while sharing a beer. Still let's face it, he lacks the eloquence of Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. There are times I was aching for him to broaden the tale and give us more of the back story. However, except in rare occasions, if Kranz didn't experience it, he doesn't write about it. I was almost shocked that he doesn't tell the story of Alan Shepard needing to urinate after being locked up in Mercury-Freedom 7 for over 4 hours prior to launch. I would have loved to known how the controllers reacted to that request. There had to be a lot of scrambling, and contradicting opinions floating about on that one (they finally told Shepard to go ahead and go in his suit). Still there are times when Kranz rises to the occasion. His description of Armstrong and Aldrin's descent to the lunar surface was riveting. I was right there in Mission Control, holding my breath with the other controllers only letting go when Neil had placed the LEM down with only 17s of fuel remaining.In the end, it's a great read by a great and humble man.