Home >  A & E >  Books

'Failure Is Not An Option' by Gene Kranz

Kranz invites readers inside NASA's manned space missions

Sunday, June 04, 2000

By Fred Bortz

	Failure Is Not An Option By Gene Kranz Simon & Schuster $26.00

With failure out of the question, NASA flight director Gene Kranz opted for flawless. That’s the adjective that comes to mind after reading Kranz’s thrilling and enthralling memoir, especially in the minds of people old enough to recall the public exhilaration over America’s early manned missions.

How can they forget Project Mercury, with Alan Shepard’s 1961 suborbital flight that put the United States solidly back in the space race, and the three orbits of John Glenn that followed less than a year later? Then came Gemini, with Ed White’s space walk and, later, the successful rendezvous and docking maneuvers that put the United States in the lead of the space race for good.

Finally came Apollo, and its unforgettable moments: the “Spaceship Earth” photo, the Christmas Eve 1968 recitation of the opening verses of Genesis from lunar orbit and Neil Armstrong’s “one small step ...”

But as the memories of those programs come into sharper focus, so do their flaws: the prematurely blown hatch that led to the sinking of Gus Grissom’s Project Mercury Liberty Bell 7 capsule; the tragic fire that killed Grissom, White and fellow Apollo I astronaut Roger Chafee during a routine test of their capsule on the ground; and the heroic recovery of the crippled Apollo XIII spacecraft.

Kranz was on the job for all of these, often as the man in charge of the flight at NASA’s Mission Control Center. Decades later, his vivid, detailed account places readers at his side, sharing his experiences, his emotions and his fine-tuned understanding of the role failure plays en route to success, discovering that “the right stuff” was required as much in the control room as in the cockpit.

Skillfully woven with Kranz’s control-room experiences are vignettes of his personal life. Readers will smile at his courtship and enduring marriage to wife Marta, the subsequent births of their six children and her contributions to his character and leadership, not least of which were Kranz’s famous “White Team” mission vests.

After reading Kranz’s description of the Apollo XI lunar touchdown, readers will finally understand how the controllers could allow Armstrong to ignore the alarms of his overloaded computer while flying on the descent stage’s last fumes of fuel.

They will experience the controllers’ life-or-death decision to have Glenn’s Friendship 7 re-enter the atmosphere with its retro-rocket pack still attached, requiring some skillful piloting from the astronaut. They will share Kranz’s tearful relief when the Apollo XIII crew was safely aboard the recovery vessel in the Pacific.

Less dramatic, but equally significant and challenging, were the final four Apollo missions. To many in the rest of the country, they were anticlimactic, but Kranz saw them then -- as he does now -- as only the beginning. His carefully worded epilogue challenges a new generation to complete his generation’s dream, an adventure well begun but now too long deferred. In his view, failure to do so is not -- should not be -- an option.

A physicist who lives in Monroeville, Fred Bortz is an author of science books for young readers, including “Catastrophe! Great Engineering Failure -- and Success.”