Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz

From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: “Tough” and “Competent.” Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.

—Gene Kranz, Apollo Flight Director, 
January 30, 1967
, 3 Days after the Apollo 1 Fire

For me these words epitomize the spirit of the Apollo program. Space is a phenomenally perilous business. To conquer it demands perfection, or as close to perfection as can be achieved. In Gene Kranz’s 2000 memoir, Failure Is Not an Option, he describes how this spirit of toughness and competence came about and how it carried twelve Americans to the lunar surface (and brought them home). At the same time, the book also humanizes the workers of Mission Control, introducing us to their quirky rituals, their colorful backgrounds and personalities, and the fears and apprehensions they felt during flights.

The book covers a little of Kranz’s early life and time as a military flyer and test pilot, but most of it focuses on his NASA career. Kranz joined NASA in October 1960, after the Mercury 7 astronauts were selected in 1959 but before the first manned Mercury launch in May 1961. His first task, under the direction and mentorship of legendary flight director Chris Kraft, was to write procedures for Mercury Mission Control. As the space program matured through Gemini and into Apollo, he took on more responsibilities and eventually became a lead flight director himself.

Like fellow flight director and memoirist Glynn Lunney, Kranz is not a natural or trained writer. But unlike Lunney’s Highways into Space, Failure Is Not an Option benefits from editing and assistance. In his acknowledgements, Kranz notes that he had help throughout the writing process. A Man on the Moon author Andy Chaikin and Apollo 13 screenwriter Al Reinert coached him in writing a book proposal and an outline. A group of Mission Control colleagues and historians assessed the book’s accuracy. A NASA public affairs officer and a journalist friend helped him shape, condense, and focus the narrative. An independent editor took another pass through the book, as did an editor at Simon & Schuster. The result is a polished story that reads well, flows smoothly from scene to scene, and provides a strong sense of chronological progression.

That progression is important here, since it makes the book’s most impressive accomplishment possible. Going into the book, it might seem as though it will spend an outsized amount of time on the Apollo 13 mission. Kranz is best known to the public as one of the flight directors during the mission, especially after his memorable portrayal by Ed Harris in the film Apollo 13. The easy way out here would be for Kranz to center his story around those events, focusing on the stuff about which his audience is already interested. But instead, Kranz opts for deliberate pacing that gradually builds up to the mission.

The reader sees Mission Control take shape from its very beginnings, growing and maturing from the Mercury test launch failures of 1960 to the struggles with rendezvous and spacewalks during Gemini to the Apollo 1 tragedy. We understand how the culture of Mission Control evolved in the decade leading up to the Apollo 13 mission, and we can clearly see how the “tough and competent” philosophy was ultimately responsible for bringing astronauts Lovell, Haise, and Swigert home safely. The Apollo 13 explosion happens around page 310 of a 380-page book. But instead of feeling as though Kranz is giving the mission short shrift, I felt he provided the necessary buildup to let the reader understand how NASA’s culture had been deliberately shaped to overcome such a crisis.

As with Lunney’s book, some of the most interesting material here deals with the personal and social lives of the flight controllers. Kranz highlights the all-consuming nature of the job, in which wives and children were neglected and time with them was sacrificed in the name of  meeting the moon-landing deadline. He details the raucus post-mission celebrations at the Singing Wheel, a bar in nearby Webster, Texas. Like Lunney, he discusses the quirky exploits of larger-than-life flight controller John Llewellyn. (In one anecdote, Llewellyn, having gotten his parking pass revoked, commutes to work at Mission Control on a horse.)

Kranz also talks about his own idiosyncrasies—for each mission he wore a new vest sewn by his wife, Marta. And, in an effort to make his console handbooks easy to find, he pasted cut-out images of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models on their covers. In a particularly fascinating section, Kranz talks about the “bubble” in which he lived, focused so tightly on his work that he was relatively unaware of events in the outside world. He visits the University of California, Santa Cruz, for a technical conference about follow-on Apollo missions and is shocked to see young hippies protesting the war in Vietnam.

Refreshingly, Kranz is honest about his personal fears and apprehensions. During the run-up to the first Mercury launch, he writes, “I found it difficult to believe that the people in my building were the core of the team that would put an American in space. For the first time in my life I felt lost, unqualified, but no one sensed my confusion. Then I thought, maybe they feel just like me.” This fact of life in Mission Control—an underlying sense of fear and anxiety that is overcome by a professional focus on the task at hand, is also featured prominently in Sy Liebergot’s Apollo EECOM: Journey of a Lifetime.

The book’s extensive look into the work at Mission Control is yet another reminder of how everywhere you look in the Apollo program, there are systems and processes of unbelievable complexity. Here they range from the backrooms filled with computers and experts, to the libraries of handbooks detailing every conceivable mission scenario, to the communications systems linking Houston to Florida to the Moon.

And that’s just at Mission Control. Elsewhere in the program—in spacecraft design and construction, astronaut training, recovery operations, and a thousand other subsections of Apollo—similar complexities lie just beneath the surface. Reading a cross-section of the Apollo literature, it becomes clear why tens of thousands of people were needed to achieve the Moon-landing task. There is absolutely no way a single person or a small group of people could command deep knowledge in all of the program’s virtually limitless facets.

I deeply enjoyed Failure Is Not an Option. Kranz is in a perfect position to deliver a unique perspective on the growth of NASA in the early years of manned spaceflight, and he executes the work splendidly. That said, there’s one thing I would have liked to have seen in the book that wasn’t there. The public knows Kranz best from the film Apollo 13, and I would have enjoyed reading his take on the film. How did he think the production captured his personality and his role? How does the film’s Mission Control compare to the real one in 1970? What does he think the film nails and/or gets wrong? Though the book was published five years after the film, nearly no mention is made of Ron Howard's movie. But this is a minor quibble. Overall, the book is a terrific and essential addition to the Apollo library. Failure Is Not an Option fully delivers on its promise, and I highly recommend it.