Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond
by Gene Kranz · 7 Jan 2000 · 549pp · 162,164 words
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the lunar landing years later. Meeting ABC correspondent Jules Bergman was the highlight of her trip. She talked about it for years afterward. I mean, Gene Kranz was a guy she had known since he had been born—but Jules was a star!) Gemini 76—the biggest and riskiest one so far
Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992
by Rick Houston and J. Milt Heflin · 27 Sep 2015 · 472pp · 141,591 words
Patricia McDivitt 7. Meeting at flight director’s console during flight of Gemini 5 8. Mission control overview during Apollo 8 9. Ken Mattingly 10. Gene Kranz’s Apollo 9 White Team 11. Flight controllers during Apollo 9 landing and recovery operations 12. Snoopy and Charlie Brown dolls overlook Charlie Duke 13
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launch plot board signed 16. Ken Mattingly during Apollo 13 launch 17. Mission control moments before start of Apollo 13 crisis 18. Glynn Lunney and Gene Kranz celebrate Apollo 13 splashdown 19. Sy Liebergot and Bill Moon 20. Charlie Harlan discusses a probe mockup with Gene Cernan and John Young 21. Ed
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Fendell 22. Neil Hutchinson, Gene Kranz, and Gerry Griffin 23. Apollo 17 Lunar Module Challenger lifts off of the lunar surface 24. Jay Greene following the breakup of the Space Shuttle
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talk Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the lunar surface. Up a row was the throne itself, the flight director’s console. Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, Gerry Griffin, and Milt had all held court there once upon a time. Amazing. It was in those few moments when the concept
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due to what they did here—Building 30 is now named after Kraft, the godfather of all things mission control, and actor Ed Harris made Gene Kranz all the more legendary with his portrayal and “Failure is not an option” line in the blockbuster movie Apollo 13. Those are just two of
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as flight director. My feelings about this place can best be characterized by the word “reverence.” Chris Kraft referred to this place as “this palace.” Gene Kranz called it a “leadership laboratory.” I would later introduce it as a “cathedral.” I think we are all correct. Getting to where I was qualified
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of the orbiter Approach and Landing Tests; Bill Moon, who accepted me as his prime backroom support for the first Space Shuttle launch, STS-1; Gene Kranz, who selected me to be a flight director in the class of 1983; and finally, Tommy Holloway, who gave me very tough love, preventing me
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on pure reverence because of the things that happened here, as if it were actually a church. Others refer to it simply as “the Palace.” Gene Kranz, on the other hand, called it a “leadership laboratory.” Either way, the point remained the same. So important were the events that took place
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known as a force in the MOCR as well. “John was somewhat on the short-tempered side against those people that he considered ‘pogues,’” remembered Gene Kranz, who competed in judo with Llewellyn and Dutch von Ehrenfried. “Pogues were people that in his mind did not measure up at being steely eyed
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, but with the flight surgeon. “Most of the people recognized that this was sort of an aberration for how the Mission Control Center should work,” Gene Kranz remembered. “It was not surprising, because to a great extent, the teams we fielded down at the Cape were like sandlot softball. Basically, we didn
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things to remember, though, are that these debates took place outside the MOCR, before a flight, and that input came from several sources. According to Gene Kranz, nearly 30 percent of pre-mission planning was spent on developing mission rules, which represented “a meeting of the minds between the flight director, mission
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, and if the title sounded relatively self-explanatory, it nonetheless became one of the MOCR’s most controversial positions. The role was the brainchild of Gene Kranz, who had worked procedures under original NASA flight directors Chris Kraft and John D. Hodge during the early Mercury days. “This goes back into, I
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console. Von Ehrenfried would come to respect the man as a friend, mentor, and brother. “You start spending eight to sixteen hours a day with Gene Kranz, you’re going to learn something,” von Ehrenfried said. “Many times, we would work so hard, I would just kind of hope he would faint
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in the MOCR. He had a point. The men who served as flight director were different, and they did approach their jobs in different ways. Gene Kranz took fastidious notes, while Griffin took few. Others joked with Glynn Lunney and told him to slow down, that they were not quite as smart
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. in May 1963. Those ranks were exactly doubled, to a total of four, after it was announced in a 4 September 1964 press release that Gene Kranz and Glynn Lunney had also been named as flight directors. They were, the announcement read, “responsible not only for making operational decisions involving spacecraft performance
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of his eye, Carlton noticed Clifford E. “Cliff” Charlesworth drift over to the flight director’s console, then Glynn Lunney too, and they gathered around Gene Kranz. Dick Thorson entered and nonchalantly plopped down right next to Carlton. Although he did not know it, something was up. When Carlton asked if he
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a great source of pride. The sim guys felt as much pride in that as the controllers did in actually flying the mission.” Incredibly, though, Gene Kranz estimated that controllers spent less than 20 percent of their time in pad tests, sims, and actual missions. The majority of their time was spent
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located across the road from the center and just one of several communities that sprang up in the area. Within months of the formal announcement, Gene Kranz dispatched Dutch von Ehrenfried to Houston to scout the area’s real estate situation. Housing had to be adequate but relatively inexpensive, with down payments
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the information he needed—and to get his foot in the door as a potential operator himself. He met Lunney, the Flight Dynamics Branch chief; Gene Kranz, who headed up the Flight Control Operations Branch; and Arnie Aldrich, chief of the Gemini systems branch. “You talk about falling into a tub of
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went back to Houston, and, according to Aaron, “had some good words to say about me. That really started the process of being recognized by Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft, and so forth. They took an interest in me and then started mentoring me in all aspects of NASA.” Arnie Aldrich was also
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time. “To a great extent, many of the early people that we had in Mercury had very little background or experience in working with computers,” Gene Kranz said. “To a great extent, we were technical dinosaurs. Young folks like John Aaron, Phil Shaffer, and Don Puddy, that generation came in with a
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months. Plenty of potential controllers had been hired to staff a control center that was ready to roll, and in September 1964, Glynn Lunney and Gene Kranz became flight directors in order to help Chris Kraft and John Hodge oversee it all. The two men joined the fledgling Space Task Group at
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the tracking stations spread throughout the world—the capcom, a controller dispatched from Houston, or an astronaut who also happened to be on site? To Gene Kranz, astronauts were there to observe and help out if needed—“if needed” being the key phrase. Try telling that to Pete Conrad, who showed up
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Jim McDivitt, EECOMs Dick Glover and John Aaron, and astronaut Elliott See (standing, left to right) gather at the flight director’s console to brief Gene Kranz (dark vest), Chris Kraft (leaning forward, chin in hand), and John Hodge about a critical power-down procedure during the flight of Gemini 5. Courtesy
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going out to the worldwide tracking network. As he tried to explain what had taken place, everybody could hear him. Mel, this sucker blew up. Gene Kranz was still trying to hold out hope. “He wouldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t accept that,” Carlton continued. “He had FIDO run the trajectory
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the astronaut corps, and there was one taking place in the MOCR as well. Chris Kraft’s decision to focus his energies on management brought Gene Kranz into the role of lead flight director for the first time during Gemini 9. Not only that, but Glynn Lunney and Cliff Charlesworth were ready
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could not handle the responsibilities of the position. Instead, he just wanted to get on with the program. Get on with it he did. With Gene Kranz gearing up for Apollo, Lunney and Cliff Charlesworth were left to swap lead flight director duties for the remaining three missions of the Gemini program
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reported the whole thing. Brooks was accused of being in violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibited federal employees from engaging in political activities. Although Gene Kranz testified that the whole episode had been a joke, Brooks wound up suspended for thirty days without pay. Just like that, Peters was moved from
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the tapes. “Nobody expected it, and it was devastating. It caused doubts about ourselves we hadn’t had before.” On the Monday following the accident, Gene Kranz told John Hodge that he was calling a meeting in a Building 30 auditorium. His initial shock had turned to anger. Three astronauts were dead
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press release announced that Glynn Lunney had been assigned as lead flight director for Apollo 7, the first manned flight of the redesigned program, while Gene Kranz was scheduled at that point to handle the second, Apollo 8. There were no surprises there, but it was the next piece of news that
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second’s time on a MOCR console. For some in the control room, that was cause for, if not outright resentment, then certainly surprise. Definitely, Gene Kranz disagreed. “I believed all flight directors should be selected from the ranks of mission control and was surprised by the selection of two virtual unknowns
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maker on every other flight director, but Griffin understood that he had somebody else in his corner, at least when it came to his selection. “Gene Kranz got into it a little, probably even when I was selected, or maybe even quite a bit,” Griffin figured. One way or the other, John
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” in Houston, at NASA headquarters in Washington, and with other outside groups involved in the Lunar Exploration Program. In his place as division chief went Gene Kranz, who figured that Hodge’s decision to move on was partly personal, partly organizational, and partly policy related. In the end, he believed that Kraft
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could either work things out among themselves, or he would step in and make whatever call needed to be made. Nobody was going to intimidate Gene Kranz, but he did not become an autocratic dictator either. “Kranz always thought that whatever he did was right, and if somebody didn’t like
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on an almost daily basis. One by one, meetings led to more meetings and others were brought into the highly secretive fold. Kraft felt out Gene Kranz, Aldrich, and Jerry Bostick about Apollo 8’s lunar plans before the end of the year during a meeting on Friday, 9 August. Aldrich was
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Lunar Module out for its first manned spin, with CMP Dave Scott staying behind to mind the CSM. McDivitt, in particular, was a favorite of Gene Kranz, the mission’s lead flight director. All but a war had been fought over control of crew procedures between those in the MOCR and Deke
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. Courtesy NASA. Really, the question made perfect sense. Glynn Lunney wanted the first lunar landing as badly as the next guy, certainly as much as Gene Kranz, Cliff Charlesworth, or any of the other flight directors active at the time. Lunney was lead flight director on Apollo 10, so maybe this was
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12, and their backups, Dave Scott and James B. “Jim” Irwin. Late in the afternoon, with several successful runs already under their belt that day, Gene Kranz felt his team was primed and ready to go. Dick Koos was about to throw the control team a wickedly breaking curveball with the count
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. “Dammit, we should have finished our training with a landing on the surface.” “We were very young,” Garman added. “It wasn’t funny, particularly when Gene Kranz started bawling out the sim guys, saying they never should have given us a sim like that and the sim guys turned around and bawled
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. We were giving them too much information, I thought.” 14. As Eagle drew ever closer to the lunar surface, capcom Charlie Duke asked flight director Gene Kranz for silence over the comm loops. Kranz quickly complied. Courtesy NASA. Kranz answered the future moonwalker’s request by telling his controllers that from that
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Merritt, Bill Stoval, Bill Boone, and Bob Heselmeyer all made significant contributions. The SPAN rooms, MER, and contractors across the country ran around the clock. Gene Kranz could not have done it on his own. Instead, each of these men and many, many more people banded together to bring Lovell, Haise, and
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. . . blastoff from the moon and rendezvous between the LM and CSM . . . whatever might come his way. The two men came away disappointed—Stoval was on Gene Kranz’s White Team and Boone on Glynn Lunney’s Black, and both groups were slated to handle the much-less dynamic coasts to and from
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it all come back,” said Liebergot, referring to the preceding flight’s lightning strike during launch. “It wasn’t my luck. I tried to put Gene Kranz off for a couple minutes.” As Liebergot and Brown went through their paces, Haise dropped another bombshell from more than 200,000 miles away. We
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the camera for a second in an attempt to collect himself. “It was neat.” 18. It had been a close call, but Glynn Lunney (foreground), Gene Kranz, and the rest of the MOCR are able to celebrate moments after the Apollo 13 Command Module Odyssey splashed down. Courtesy NASA. It had been
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, because guys that are really, really good engineers and really, really good technically sometimes can’t do the people thing worth a damn.” 22. While Gene Kranz (center) still sported his familiar crew cut, Gerry Griffin (right) had let his grow out a bit more by the time Apollo 17 rolled around
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Shuttle era were the controllers who had worked the glory years of Apollo. Kelso got one of his first big lessons when he first encountered Gene Kranz in the hallway on a Friday leading into a three-day weekend. The up-and-coming flight controller was both in awe and terrified. This
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was, after all, Gene Kranz—tough guy of Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 fame, complete with his signature crew cut. Somehow, Kelso worked up the courage to speak. Mr. Kranz
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Sound. Like few things ever before, the movie brought the work of mission control front and center into the public consciousness. It made stars of Gene Kranz, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Sy Liebergot. Kranz had been on duty as flight director when the accident took place, and that, along with
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encouraged him in his efforts to become a flight director. “You marketed not only your current but your previous work experience in recovery very well,” Gene Kranz wrote in his critique of Heflin’s flight director interview. “This is a very important part of your background that I think has contributed to
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, Dana J. Weigel, Robert C. “Bob” Dempsey, Richard S. Jones, Michael L. Sarafin, Holly E. Ridings, and Ginger Kerrick. The torch Chris Kraft, Glynn Lunney, Gene Kranz, Gerry Griffin, and so many others passed to him was the same one he handed off to his class of flight directors. His predecessors took
Apollo
by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox · 1 Jan 1989 · 619pp · 197,256 words
those days, he even looked like a bull—over 200 pounds, a powerful man with a square head, dark, close-cropped hair, and heavy brows. Gene Kranz, who himself would scare a few people in his time, never forgot his first encounter with Williams. It happened in 1960, just a few weeks
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, the young Glynn Lunney wore the same kind of loafers, smoked the same kind of cigars, held his cigar in the same way as Kraft. Gene Kranz, with his fighter-pilot experience, saw himself in his early days with Flight Operations as Kraft’s wing man. He would arrive at Mercury Control
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would be marked forever as the man who had failed to save the astronauts. “It is the finest job in the space-flight business,” said Gene Kranz of the flight director’s post. But it was not one for just anybody. 1 Even before Mercury had ended, Chris Kraft had become the
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would be the Red Team; and Hodge was Blue Flight. When Gemini began in 1965, Kraft added three more flight directors. The first two were Gene Kranz, White Flight, who had been acting as Kraft’s assistant flight director during Mercury, and Glynn Lunney, Black Flight, the youngest of the original members
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normal for him,” a colleague said. “He couldn’t help it if it’s not normal for everybody else.” The third member of the triumvirate, Gene Kranz, was similar to Lunney only in his open relish of the job. Lunney looked as if he belonged in a Campbell’s Soup ad, whereas
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Gene Kranz looked like a drill sergeant in some especially bloodthirsty branch of the armed forces—hair cropped to a regulation military brush, with a wedge of
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” and Sousa marches every morning in his office. They got him pumped up, ready to give his all, which was the only throttle setting on Gene Kranz’s personality. More than the other flight directors, Kranz had a fierce loyalty to his team, the White Team, even though its members changed from
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emotions of the real thing—controllers swore that, with momentary exceptions, they felt no more anxiety during missions than they had during the sims. To Gene Kranz, the sims were the reason the missions succeeded. “I could say it’s hard work, perseverance, all of those things. But it was the training
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Eagle into its translunar trajectory. At eight o’clock on Sunday morning, Houston time, July 20, 1969, the LEM Eagle disappeared behind the moon and Gene Kranz’s White Team took over the MOCR to handle the lunar descent. Kranz had already been to mass early that morning at the Shrine of
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stand by. Steve Bales, twenty-six years old, with some advice from a twenty-four-year-old, given nineteen seconds to think it over, told Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft, General Phillips, Administrator Paine, President Nixon, and the world—and, not incidentally, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong—“Ignore the computer and trust me
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ready for T1 and T2. But he couldn’t make himself do it. He couldn’t say anything, he couldn’t move. The crisis over, Gene Kranz froze. His left hand was clutching the handle on the front of the console, his right was holding the pencil with which he wrote his
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. The main audience had been the people at M.S.C., watching on the television monitors scattered around the Center. In the MOCR, flight director Gene Kranz had permitted the O&P officer to throw the television image onto one of the screens on the front wall. With the spacecraft safely on
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it: “We lost O2 Tank 2 pressure. And temperature.” The crisis had begun. 1 minute. To the left of Liebergot and up a row was Gene Kranz. At 9:07, he and his White Team were entering the last hour of their eight-hour shift. The conversation over the flight director’s
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Lunney’s Black Team turned their consoles over to Gerry Griffin’s Gold Team. Though there had been many other memorable shifts in that room—Gene Kranz’s White Team had just finished one of them the preceding evening—no flight control team had ever been asked to make so many life
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confidence in the recollections may have been influenced by the passage of time. Yet it does appear that the flight controllers really were confident throughout. Gene Kranz explained it as a matter of training: “I don’t think anybody was pessimistic. Not at least on the White Team. . . . The training was such
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vehicle for the P.C.+2 burn. For Griffin, this was the moment when he became confident that the crew was coming home alive. For Gene Kranz, “the only dicey thing that occurred throughout all of Apollo 13” came at the conclusion of the P.C.+2 burn. The burn itself had
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had to get some rest. For his part, Chris Kraft was still worried about power consumption, as he had been since he had stood behind Gene Kranz on Monday night and watched the first hours of the crisis. Now that the burn was over, Kranz should get down to his 15-amps
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atmosphere. 6 At 4:00 A.M. on Friday, slightly more than eight hours before the scheduled splashdown and seventy-nine hours after the explosion, Gene Kranz and the White Team took over the consoles in the MOCR. The entry checklist had been given to the crew during an earlier shift. Mattingly
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, Rod Loe, Jay Greene, Jack Garman, and Emil Schiesser. All still work on the J.S.C. campus, either for NASA or for NASA contractors. Gene Kranz is still at J.S.C., directing the Mission Operations Division. The main difference between Kranz now and the Kranz of twenty years ago is
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on the monitor to the left—a view that none of flight controllers had—but Charlesworth is watching his columns of numbers. (NASA) White Flight Gene Kranz, “General Savage,” fighter pilot in the 1950s, Kraft’s right-hand man in Mercury and Gemini, Flight for the first lunar descent, Flight when the
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taken about an hour into the crisis on Apollo 13, as Don Arabian outlined the minimum voltages for operating the C.S.M. equipment to Gene Kranz. Sam Phillips (seated), head of the entire Apollo Program, watches. Glynn Lunney during the transfer of the crew into the LEM after the Apollo 13
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Bostick (face partially hidden), Bill Tindall (seated), and Chris Kraft (with cigar). (NASA) Odyssey splashes down safely at the end of Apollo 13. Gerry Griffin, Gene Kranz, and Glynn Lunney lead the cheering. (NASA) Apollo as History Writing definitive history is a solemn undertaking and Apollo was not. Our objective has been
Apollo 13
by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger · 14 Jun 2000 · 538pp · 153,734 words
signal had warned them about. Kraft had left the flight director’s job some time ago, moving upstairs into NASA management. In his place was Gene Kranz, the crewcut, square-faced, ex-Korean War aviator who came to NASA before Mercury and rose slowly and steadily until, at the outset of Apollo
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flights and ten Gemini flights, Kraft had been more than content, after Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin’s Gemini 12, to turn things over to Gene Kranz and the rest of the team of flight directors who worked under him. At the moment, Kraft was taking a shower. It was a little
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turning in for the night right about now, and Kraft intended to do the same. No need to keep graveyard-shift hours when there was Gene Kranz or someone else sitting at the flight director’s console. Through the bathroom door, Kraft thought he heard the phone ring once, then twice, then
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stop as his wife picked it up. “Betty Ann?” the voice on the end of the line said. “It’s Gene Kranz. I need to talk to Chris.” The flight director’s console, Betty Ann Kraft knew, had an outside phone line as well as an in
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Krafts were racing toward the Space Center, as the Jules Bergmans were taking to the airwaves, NASA’s hierarchy of denial was up and running. Gene Kranz, on his feet behind his console in Mission Control, paced and smoked as he always did at critical moments, working his communications loop like a
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to turn their consoles over to the night shift. According to the schedule drawn up before this flight, Glynn Lunney’s Black Team would follow Gene Kranz’s White Team in the four-team rotation. Lunney, in turn, would be followed after eight hours by Gerald Griffin’s Gold Team, then Milt
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the frazzled men who had been on duty since two o’clock that afternoon. At the flight director’s console, Lunney himself prepared to relieve Gene Kranz. At the EECOM console, Clint Burton came up beside Liebergot and laid a sympathetic hand on his shoulder; Liebergot looked up, smiled weakly, pushed away
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at that console had stopped. Elsewhere around the room, the mood was a good deal less subdued. Though Glynn Lunney’s Black Team had replaced Gene Kranz’s White Team, the White Team showed no signs of leaving the auditorium. At most of the consoles, the recently relieved controllers stood or crouched
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. In the past, when Chris Kraft had an idea like this, that idea got implemented. Nowadays, though, things were different. It was Gene Kranz who dictated the direction of things, Gene Kranz who was the true capo di tutti capi of the control room. If Chris Kraft wanted something done, he was free to
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be a breathless one aboard the ship, on the ground it would provide a chance to draw a breath. At the flight director’s console, Gene Kranz removed his headset, stepped back, and glanced around the room. What was going through his mind then was not the problem of the burn—his
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to save the mission of Apollo 12 was back in the control room to do what he could to save the crew of Apollo 13. Gene Kranz circulated through Mission Control, collected his newly named Tiger Team, plus Aaron, and led them downstairs to room 210. The room was a large, windowless
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doing.” Kranz stopped and glanced once more from controller to controller, waiting to see if there were any questions. As was often the case when Gene Kranz spoke, there weren’t any. After a few seconds he turned around and walked wordlessly out the door, heading back toward Mission Control, where dozens
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in a clean room before being hoisted and attached to the Saturn 5. Inside the spacecraft was an oxygen tank with a very questionable history. Gene Kranz, the ex-Korean War aviator and NASA’s lead flight director, was the unquestioned boss of Mission Control during the Apollo program. Chris Kraft, deputy
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April 13, 1970, Apollo 13 began its last TV transmission to Earth. Forty-three minutes later, oxygen tank two exploded. In Mission Control, Flight Director Gene Kranz (foreground, back to camera) watches Fred Haise on the viewing screen. Moments after the explosion, the crew of Apollo 14 (Stu Roosa, Ed Mitchell, and
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had been given to him in the helicopter that took him to the carrier, was fresh. (Capt. L. E. Kirkemo) A troika of flight directors—Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, and Gerald Griffin—puff celebratory cigars in Mission Control after Apollo 13’s splashdown. Haise, Lovell, and Swigert wave to cheering sailors before
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wouldn’t go anywhere without my numbers guys.” “Go get them,” Kraft said. “And get Gene too.” Kraft waited while Griffin fetched Deiterich, Reed, and Gene Kranz, and when they returned, the men made their way together over to the VIP area. When they arrived, the tableau that greeted them was an
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we quit talking about this thing,” he said, “and go see if we can’t do it.” 9 Tuesday, April 14, 2 P.M. WHEN GENE KRANZ walked into the VIP gallery hours after the PC+2 meeting broke up, the two reporters at the media consoles did not dream of trying
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the shower’s pipes banged and groaned noisily. Despite all this, on nearly every flight there were half a dozen or so overdedicated controllers—including Gene Kranz—who insisted on staying at the Center full time, so competition for the two cots was usually keen. When lunar missions started becoming almost routine
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officer standing next to him, “it looks like we’ll have work to do on Friday.” As soon as the PC+2 burn was complete, Gene Kranz, seated at the flight director’s console, took off his headset, stood, and surveyed the room. Like Gerald Griffin’s Gold Team several hours ago
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by breaking into a spontaneous, back-slapping celebration that, by Mission Control’s standards anyway, qualified as pandemonium. And like Gerald Griffin several hours ago, Gene Kranz was inclined to let the revelry run its course; he figured the team deserved its moment of self-congratulation. Besides, soon enough he would have
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turned to leave. Kraft, however, stayed where he was. Standing behind the station he had occupied from 1961 to 1966, the man who had trained Gene Kranz to perform the job he was now performing considered objecting to the decision his one-time protégé had just made. But before uttering a word
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, just the glamorous EECOMs and TELMUs and FIDOs and flight directors. Smylie made his way down the aisle, looking for Deke Slayton, Chris Kraft, or Gene Kranz. With each passing minute, he knew, the three astronauts in the distant ship were coming closer to choking on their own carbon dioxide. Smylie realized
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. “Well,” he said to Lousma, “let’s hope it was.” “I want everyone in this room to finish what they’re doing and go home.” Gene Kranz stood at the front of room 210 and spoke in what he assumed was a loud enough voice to cut through the babble of the
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without a single data point of telemetry to help him along, who were a few garden-variety controllers to disagree? Besides, in a few minutes Gene Kranz might let them go to sleep, and that was something none of them had had a chance to do in two days. Fred Haise noticed
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telling the truth. Almost as soon as Lovell clicked off the line, the doors opened at the back of Mission Control and Aaron, Aldrich, and Gene Kranz appeared. With the exception of the hour before and the hour after the PC+2 burn on Tuesday night, none of these men had been
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its second hour and Lovell was successfully firing his maneuvering jets, Mission Control was a hive of activity. Three hours earlier, according to the plan Gene Kranz had come up with during the week, Milt Windler’s Maroon Team had left the consoles, and for the first time since the PC+2
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spacecraft had survived; if it wasn’t, they would know that the crew had been consumed by the flames. At the flight director’s station, Gene Kranz stood, lit a cigarette, and clicked on to his controllers’ loop. “Let’s go around the horn once more before reentry,” he announced. “EECOM, you
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definitely noticeable one. Immediately afterward, an unmistakable voice appeared. “O.K., Joe,” Jack Swigert called. Joe Kerwin closed his eyes and drew a long breath, Gene Kranz pumped a fist in the air, the people in the VIP gallery embraced and applauded. “O.K.,” Kerwin answered without ceremony, “we read you, Jack
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Lunar module engineering manager, Grumman Aerospace Joe Kerwin Capcom and astronaut, Maroon Team Jack Knight TELMU, Maroon Team Chris Kraft Deputy director, Manned Spacecraft Center Gene Kranz Lead flight director, White Team Sy Liebergot EECOM, White Team Hai Loden Lunar module flight control officer (CONTROL), Black Team Jack Lousma Capcom and astronaut
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had the wisdom to recognize it as one worth recounting. Among those people in the first group to whom we’re the most indebted are Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft, Sy Liebergot, Gerald Griffin, Glynn Lunney, Milt Windier, John Aaron, Fred Haise, Chuck Deiterich, and Jerry Bostick. Also lending indispensable assistance were Don
Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure
by Dan Parry · 22 Jun 2009 · 370pp · 100,856 words
conceived, but during their production I was enormously privileged to discuss NASA's work with Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, Charlie Duke, Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, George Mueller and others. Humanity possesses the knowledge and experience to leave our planet at will thanks to the pioneering actions of men
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being in any particular rush to set the world alight. He never displayed any 'outer fire', as his brother put it.6 NASA flight director Gene Kranz said he never saw Armstrong argue; nevertheless he 'had the commander mentality ... and didn't have to get angry'. Neil was cool in the old
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in his chair. Nobody argued with the flight director. Six hours into the mission, Charlesworth's green team handed over to the white team of Gene Kranz, a former fighter pilot who regarded his job almost as a personal crusade. From the start, NASA had been a civilian organisation but many of
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commander of Gemini 11. Chris Kraft believed that 'Armstrong's touch was as fine as any astronaut'.17 The Gemini 8 problems began just as Gene Kranz was settling in during a shift handover in Mission Control. 'I was damned impressed with Neil,' Kranz later said. For him, fault lay with the
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a crisis in confidence, the Apollo programme faced other equally serious difficulties. The lunar module was behind schedule, the Saturn's second stage was in Gene Kranz's words 'an engineering and production nightmare',6 and awkward questions were being asked in Congress. 'We were going too fast,'7 Deke later conceded
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first time, the complete Apollo package would test the sequence of manoeuvres required for a lunar mission, short of the landing itself. Launch flight director Gene Kranz subsequently wrote that the 'Apollo 9 mission was sheer exhilaration for both the astronauts and Mission Control'.17 For McDivitt, here was a rare chance
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knew how long this process might take.33 The debate about aborting the landing if communications were seriously interrupted rumbled on for weeks. Flight director Gene Kranz was asked to write down agreements on the subject, to be added to the rest of the rules for the mission. Writing mission rules was
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help from the navy.41 Some of the locations were so remote Kraft felt that 'the word primitive was the accurate description'.42 According to Gene Kranz, late one night in 1962 flight controller Charles 'Skinny' Lewis was driving the two members of his team back to their quarters on Zanzibar when
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in an aeroplane, the commander has the final say and the controllers knew that in certain situations Neil might overrule them. To discuss this possibility, Gene Kranz held a meeting with the crew.2 They were joined by Charlie Duke, an astronaut who had been selected in 1966. Duke, who had yet
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all of us. We know how hard everybody's been working.'52 In Mission Control, Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth (centre) sits to the right of Gene Kranz. Soon after arriving in orbit, the crew's faces filled with blood until their bodies adjusted to weightlessness. Buzz Aldrin in the lunar module, photographed
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of his teeth'. While the reporters vainly searched for drops of emotion as if looking for water on the Moon, a few hundred yards away Gene Kranz and his team were beginning their final training session. The crew later gave many individual interviews before going home at the end of a 14
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to the end of their shift, and nearly two hours after they had woken the crew they began handing over to the white team of Gene Kranz. Carrying a plastic bag, Kranz walked into the Mission Operations Control Room and greeted his controllers as he slowly threaded his way towards his seat
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into the subject. Kraft was anxious to see 'those first steps live' and tried to do what he could to build the necessary support.2 Gene Kranz's unpredictable communications officer Ed Fendell was given the task of looking at the question in detail, with a view to producing a favourable report
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. His former MSC role went to Chris Kraft, the 'father of Mission Control'. Kraft stayed with NASA until 1982, when he took on consultancy work. Gene Kranz worked on the remaining Apollo flights and in 1974 was promoted to the post of Deputy Director of Mission Operations, becoming director in 1983. Working
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to Hide 1 David Harland, The First Men on the Moon. 2 Ibid. 3 For descriptions of Mission Control, see Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option (Berkley, 2000); and interview with Gene Kranz in Glen Swanson (ed.), Before This Decade Is Out. 4 Chris Kraft, Flight, My Life in Mission Control (Plume, 2002
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. cit. 30 Shayler, op. cit.; and Shepard and Slayton, op. cit. 31 Hansen, op. cit. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. Chapter 6: Grounded in Safety 1 Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option. 2 Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire. 3 Deke Slayton, Deke!; and Collins, op. cit. 4 Slayton, op. cit. 5 Dr
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NASA Mission Reports, Volume 1. 15 David West Reynolds, Apollo, The Epic Journey to the Moon (Tehabi, 2002). 16 Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire. 17 Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option. 18 http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4205/ch12-5.html 19 Kraft, op. cit. 20 Re. Apollo 10, see Slayton
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on the Moon. 23 Ibid. 24 W. Safire, NY Times, 12 July 1999, via NYTimes.com. 25 Hansen, op. cit. 26 Collins, op. cit. 27 Gene Kranz, roll 367, 07:36:00:09. 28 Collins, op. cit. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.; and Harland, op. cit. 34
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Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option. 35 Ibid. 36 Hansen, op. cit. 37 Ibid. 38 Kranz, op. cit. 39 Gene Kranz, roll 367, 07:30:34:16. 40 Ibid. 41 Kraft, op. cit. 42 Ibid. 43 Kranz
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, op. cit. Chapter 10: Pushed to the Limit 1 Dr James Hansen, First Man. 2 Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option. 3 Interview with Gene Kranz in Glen Swanson (ed.), Before This Decade Is Out. 4 Hansen, op. cit. 5 Kranz, op. cit. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid
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. 8 Hansen, op. cit. 9 Ibid. 10 Interview with Gene Kranz in Swanson (ed.), op. cit. 11 Kranz, op. cit. 12 Ibid. 13 Frank Borman, roll 386, 06:34:57. 14 Hansen, op. cit. 15 Kranz
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, op. cit. 43 Hansen, op. cit. 44 Collins, op. cit. 45 Aldrin and Warga, op. cit.; and Hansen, op. cit. 46 Hansen, op. cit.; and Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option. 47 Collins, op. cit. 48 NASA's Lunar Surface Journal, at http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.landing.html
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. 52 Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, op. cit. Chapter 12: The Eagle has Wings 1 Robert Godwin (ed.), Apollo 11, The NASA Mission Reports, Volume 2. 2 Gene Kranz, roll 368, 08:18:22:13. 3 Buzz Aldrin and Wayne Warga, Return to Earth. 4 Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire. 5 Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins
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2. 7 Collins, op. cit. 8 David Harland, The First Men on the Moon; David West Reynolds, Apollo, The Epic Journey to the Moon; and Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option. 9 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/moon/peopleevents/p_wives.html 10 Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, op. cit. 11 Ibid
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. cit. 21 Descriptions of white team from: interview with Gene Kranz in Glen Swanson (ed.), Before This Decade Is Out; and Kranz, op. cit. 22 Gene Kranz, roll 368-01, 08:18:22:13. 23 Kranz, op. cit.; interview with Gene Kranz in Swanson (ed.), op. cit.; and Gene Kranz, roll 368, 08:18:22:13. 24 Harland
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, op. cit. 25 Collins, op. cit. 26 Gene Kranz, roll 368, 08:18:22:13; and interview
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with Gene Kranz in Swanson (ed.), op. cit. 27 Dr James Hansen, First
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. 29 For Armstrong's and Aldrin's accounts of the descent, see Godwin (ed.), Apollo 11, The NASA Mission Reports, Volume 2. 30 Interview with Gene Kranz in Swanson (ed.), op. cit.; and Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, op. cit. 31 Aldrin and Warga, op. cit. 32 Ibid. 33 Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, op. cit
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. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Deke Slayton, Deke!. 38 Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, op. cit. 39 Interview with Gene Kranz in Swanson (ed.), op. cit. 40 NASA's Lunar Surface Journal, at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.html 41 Ibid. 42 Godwin
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.), Apollo 11, The NASA Mission Reports, Volume 2. 43 Aldrin and Warga, op. cit. 44 Ibid. 45 Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, op. cit. 46 Interview with Gene Kranz in Swanson (ed.), op. cit. 47 Harland, op. cit. Chapter 13: Sneaking Up on the Past 1 Robert Godwin (ed.), Apollo 11, The NASA Mission
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the Role of Business in the U.S. Space Effort, The John Day Co., 1971 Chris Kraft, Flight, My Life in Mission Control, Plume, 2002 Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option, Berkley, 2000 Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, Little, Brown, 1970 Stephanie Nolen, Promised the Moon: The Untold
A Man on the Moon
by Andrew Chaikin · 1 Jan 1994 · 816pp · 242,405 words
of Sky & Telescope magazine. The Space Shuttle era had arrived, but for me, it was Apollo that held special fascination. By 1984 I had interviewed Gene Kranz, the flight director who had been in the trenches of mission control during the first lunar landing, and Harvard geologist Clifford Frondell, who had been
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was spinning out of control, and it wasn’t until many anxious minutes had passed that Armstrong stabilized the craft. By that time, flight director Gene Kranz was preparing to abort the mission. Anders radioed the countdown for retrofire to Armstrong and Scott. Half an hour later, Gemini 8 was floating in
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Slayton’s offer. He had already decided that, assuming it was successful, this flight would be his last. As the first weeks of June passed, Gene Kranz and his team had turned the corner. They had nearly mastered the challenges of the Powered Descent. They had firmed up the mission rules—critical
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Descent. Soon the spacecraft would reappear, and if all had gone according to plan, Eagle would be on its way down to 50,000 feet. Gene Kranz and his team of flight controllers—they were called the White Team—sat at their consoles, wearing lightweight headsets, anticipating the Acquisition of Signal. For
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the drama to come. Just looking at them drove home the fact that this was not a simulation. In the third row of the MOCR, Gene Kranz sat at the flight director's console wearing a brand new white vest. When he was on shift he always wore a white vest, made
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to do. He had never seen this kind of alarm in a descent simulation; now he wished it would just go away. In mission control Gene Kranz felt as if he were in one of those bad simulations back in the dark days of early June. He had almost been glad when
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was no longer following the nominal landing profile, that it had slowed its descent and was still moving at a good clip over the moon. Gene Kranz knew then that the partnership had all but dissolved, that the “center of gravity of the decision-making process" was no longer some point midway
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numerous that it was impossible to train for them all. And everyone had always considered the odds of such a scenario very small. In Houston, Gene Kranz was at the flight director's console, presiding over a team of flight controllers who could not believe what they were seeing. In the minutes
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taken a seat next to Jack Lousma, where he plugged in a headset. He listened to the voices on the flight director's loop as Gene Kranz and his controllers grappled with the bewildering mess that was unfolding 200,000 miles out in space. As an expert on the command module, Mattingly
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men were now marching together toward a clear goal, to get Apollo 13 back on the free-return trajectory, and then home to earth. Meanwhile, Gene Kranz organized controllers and specialists into teams to work on the rest of the recovery effort. How quickly should they bring Apollo 13 home? To answer
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glad to hear. “I thought it was about time we crossed,” he told Kerwin. ‘Thank you. We’re on our way back home.” In Houston, Gene Kranz and his White Team of controllers were racing the clock to come up with the reentry checklist. Nothing would draw more concentrated effort. Kranz split
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if they will be blooming even Saturday when you return,” Brand ventured. Not only was Mattingly healthy, but he’d been working like mad with Gene Kranz’s controllers to put together the reentry checklist. At 6:30, Vance Brand radioed that it was nearly ready and that Swigert should get ready
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hide anything. The day after Lovell's crew splashed down Richard Nixon came to the space center and presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, and the other flight directors of Apollo 13. Tom Paine was there too, sitting on the stage, watching as Nixon praised the ingenuity
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establish the location of the lunar module from the astronauts’ descriptions of the terrain. Today, women comprise almost a third of the flight control rosters (Gene Kranz letter to the author, 1993). 173 Suddenly, it all went bad: This simulation probably took place on June 27, which was a day full of
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was out of view. They could, however, see part of the lunar far side, which was in complete shadow; hence the “crescent of blackness.” 190 Gene Kranz and his team of flight controllers called the White Team: The practice by flight directors of adopting colors began with the final Mercury flight and
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Race to the Moon, pp. 286, 288). 192 “Dammit, we really did somethingThis speech is derived from a combination of the author’s interview with Gene Kranz and the quote on p. 348 of Apollo: The Race to the Moon. 192 suggested to Duke that Eagle yaw slightly to one side: Because
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engineers had envisioned using the lander’s engines to push a crippled command ship out of lunar orbit. Eight years later, training for Apollo 9, Gene Kranz’s flight controllers were hit with a simulation in which Jim McDivitt and Rusty Schweickart were stranded in a lopsided orbit around the earth. They
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’s crew, no one ever envisioned using the LM in precisely the way it was used on Apollo 13 (sources: the author’s interviews with Gene Kranz; Murray and Cox, A polio: The Race to the Moon, p. 423). 305 Power values for radio and environmental control system: These numbers were supplied
Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon
by Jeffrey Kluger · 15 May 2017 · 396pp · 112,354 words
been paying attention throughout the year, the immolation of Grissom, White, and Chaffee was not an accident but an inevitability—equal parts tragedy and disgrace. * * * Gene Kranz, one of NASA’s top flight directors, was not in Mission Control on the night of January 27. Moments before the fire struck, he was
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stage. The lesson was over. * * * The news of the death of the three astronauts came to Frank Borman the same way it had come to Gene Kranz: with a knock at the door. Borman, Susan, and their boys were staying at a friend’s cabin on a lake in Huntsville, Texas, and
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business. Still, most people agreed that if the day-to-day operation of the program had been the responsibility of someone like Chris Kraft or Gene Kranz, heads would have been knocked together earlier and the shoddy work exposed a lot sooner. Maybe that wouldn’t have saved Grissom, White, and Chaffee
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Kraft believed he and everyone else needed. Finally, at the end of the week, he summoned the one other person whose opinion he most needed: Gene Kranz. Kranz had become such a critical figure in the overall operation of Mission Control that he no longer had the time to man a console
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three days before Apollo 8’s launch. * * * Creating the necessary software and writing the needed computer code was another hurdle for the Apollo 8 team. Gene Kranz might have given Bob Ernal the use of every computer in Buildings 12 and 30 for an entire weekend, but a thumbs-up from Ernal
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, who had played a central part in the debate by Chris Kraft’s team about whether Apollo 8 should orbit the moon, was known by Gene Kranz and other higher-ups at NASA as “the architect”—a hat tip to his status as the person who had blueprinted all of the Apollo
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Earth. At the very peak of their current orbit, the Apollo 8 crew still had 233,604 miles to go. TEN December 21, 1968 Technically, Gene Kranz did not need to be present at Mission Control in Houston on the day Apollo 8 launched. The official manning list—the roster of every
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big motor—stood in for whatever emotions the men had been born to feel but had fought and trained not to feel. In Mission Control, Gene Kranz, exercising the privilege of the spectator, allowed himself to feel plenty. Standing at the back of the room, he watched as the big map on
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minutes of radio silence began, the three astronauts were disconnected from the rest of humanity in a way that no one ever had been before. * * * Gene Kranz stood at the back of Mission Control and listened for the rasp of Zippo lighters, and they began almost as if on cue. Zippos were
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-knuckle work of sending men to the moon. If the Apollo 8 controllers were showing the strain, however, today none of that mattered. Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, Bob Gilruth, George Mueller, and the other members of the space agency brass barely left the Mission Control auditorium except to go home for a
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the business at hand. On the ground, many of the controllers were not quite ready to let go of the feelings they had just experienced. Gene Kranz, for all his military grit, was also something of a sentimentalist, which he would readily admit. When the broadcast from Apollo 8 ended, he stood
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and execution. Here he is seen at his administrator’s console at the back of Mission Control during the flight of Gemini 4 in 1965. Gene Kranz was one of the rotating team of flight directors who supervised all the other controllers in Mission Control; during his shifts, he called the moment
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reliably answered my calls and e-mails whenever I had questions—which, I confess, was often. Those people, listed alphabetically, are: Michael Collins, Gerry Griffin, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, and Milt Windler. I also benefited from the dozens of interviews I conducted years ago when Jim Lovell and I were writing Apollo
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, by Andrew Chaikin, Rockets and People, by Boris Chertok; Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins; Flight, by Chris Kraft; Failure Is Not an Option, by Gene Kranz; Genesis, by Robert Zimmerman; and Apollo 8, the official NASA mission report. Perhaps the best source of material on the history of NASA is NASA
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Christmas in space and crater named for Gemini 5 and Gemini 6–7 dual mission and Kranz and Mercury missions and Saturn V and Kranz, Gene Kranz, Marta Laitin, Christine Laitin, Joe Langley Aeronautical Laboratory launch pad LeMay, Curtis LEM (lunar excursion module) Anders and Apollo 5 and Apollo 7 and Apollo
Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11
by James Donovan · 12 Mar 2019
. Sitting next to Kraft in the control room for the first time, in the new position of assistant flight director, was twenty-eight-year-old Gene Kranz, a former air force fighter pilot. After a couple of years as a flight-test engineer with McDonnell, in October of 1960 the crew-cut
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) was larger and more up-to-date and would host not one or two but three shifts of flight controllers for around-the-clock operations. Gene Kranz would oversee one shift; he named his team White, in contrast to Kraft’s Red team. John Hodge, the pipe-smoking engineer whose gray hair
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Cape, it was unclear what was happening, but they knew it wasn’t good. Hodge called Kraft from his office, and they soon found out. Gene Kranz had been at home, getting ready to go out with his wife, when his next-door neighbor, a NASA branch chief, knocked on his door
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to its survival. Many in NASA—particularly the higher-ups—engaged in self-examination: Could they have said or done anything to prevent the tragedy? Gene Kranz, deputy director of Flight Control under John Hodge, went beyond introspection. After Friday night’s unofficial wake at the Singing Wheel and a weekend spent
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might have been shaken into unconsciousness, or even to death. The third stage ignited, then shut down and failed to reignite. Only skillful work by Gene Kranz’s Mission Control team prevented all three stages from busting into pieces; they managed to get the command-service module into orbit and through a
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. Some of the flight controllers half joked about purposely landing the spacecraft in the middle of a hurricane swirling near Hawaii. Years later, flight director Gene Kranz—who had claimed Schirra was one of his favorite astronauts to work with—reported that there wasn’t anyone in Mission Control who didn’t
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his measured responses were rarely helpful to a reporter looking for a glib sound bite. It wasn’t the luck of the draw that got Gene Kranz the plum assignment of flight director for the lunar descent, and it wasn’t the fact that he was a good friend of Cliff Charlesworth
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knows? he thought. The knowledge might come in handy. July 5, eleven days before the flight, was to be the final day of simulations for Gene Kranz’s White team, which had been assigned the lunar landing; the team members still had plenty of other things to do in preparation, and he
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Lunney’s Black team had been there most of the night while the crew slept, and they were about to hand over the console to Gene Kranz’s White team. They wouldn’t go far—Black was also the ascent team and had to be present during the descent in case of
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and they had to take off. Kranz’s White team would decide that, but the spacecraft had to be ready. In Mission Control, the unflappable Gene Kranz found himself overwhelmed with emotion and unable to speak. He knew he needed to do something to get himself and his team focused. With the
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21, 1962. Glenn might be the first: On a Discovery Channel miniseries called Rocket Science, produced and aired in Canada in 2002–2003, flight controller Gene Kranz said, “Every one of us believed we would lose one, possibly even more, astronauts during the Mercury program.” would remember thinking: Williams, “The Flight of
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in the pilot” (Chris Kraft interview, May 23, 2008, JSC Oral History Project). “pull the plug on Wally Schirra”: Liebergot and Harland, Apollo EECOM, 128; Gene Kranz interview, January 8, 1999, JSC Oral History Project. “Somebody down there”: Quoted in French and Burgess, In the Shadow of the Moon, 218. wasn’t
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Moon”; Wilford, We Reach the Moon; JSC Oral History Project interviews with John Aaron, Richard Battin, Bob Carlton, Jack Garman, Frank E. Hughes, Christopher Kraft, Gene Kranz, and others; author interviews with John Aaron, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Steve Bales, Bob Carlton, Mike Collins, and Jack Garman; Eric Jones’s superb Apollo
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right side of the photo Aldrin takes the first step onto the moon’s surface. Armstrong during the lunar surface EVA, standing near the LM. Gene Kranz (left) behind flight directors Glynn Lunney (center) and Cliff Charlesworth during the Apollo 11 EVA. Aldrin took this photo of a tired but happy Armstrong
Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her
by Rowland White and Richard Truly · 18 Apr 2016 · 570pp · 151,609 words
, Dan Brandenstein passed his seat at the CapCom console to Bronze Team’s Hank Hartsfield, while Brandenstein’s Silver Team flight director, Neil Hutchinson, joined Gene Kranz, the pugnacious deputy director of Flight Operations who would one day be credited with the line “Failure is not an option,” for the change-of
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of Columbia, trying to establish whether or not it was even going to be possible to attempt to capture a picture of the Shuttle. • • • As Gene Kranz and Neil Hutchinson continued to field questions about how they planned to capture pictures of the orbiter, Bob Crippen and John Young returned to the
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-shift press conference—and another barrage of questions from reporters about the tiles. They were becoming more forensic, scratching harder at some of the suggestions Gene Kranz had made about possible orbits for taking pictures from ground-based systems. “I’ll tell Mr. Kranz when I see him tomorrow,” Lewis joked, “that
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case of contingencies prior to the launch, the Air Force passed details of what it needed to be done on to NASA, where, coordinated by Gene Kranz, the information was filtered through to Mission Control. • • • Irrespective of what reassurance came out of Building 13, the one thing Tom Moser’s Structures and
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Flight Control team worked on revisions to the next day’s flight plan. During the day’s first change-of-shift press conference, Hutchinson and Gene Kranz had said they were hoping to avoid making any changes to the flight plan, but as Hutchinson’s Silver Team considered the orbital attitudes required
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, a jet was kept on standby to carry the results of their efforts back across the Gulf of Mexico to Ellington Field. Waiting in Houston, Gene Kranz thought, It’s going to probably take longer to get the film here than it is to analyze it . . . • • • At twenty-three hours mission elapsed
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all that it was hoped that the attitude of the Shuttle would help facilitate NORAD’s efforts to take the picture, the report received by Gene Kranz in Houston claimed that, on this pass, the elevation level was too low. For now, the aircraft on standby at Patrick to spirit any pictures
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seemed appropriate enough, as Unionville’s 2,000-strong population were located directly below a celestial pursuit that, in Mission Control in Houston, Flight Director Gene Kranz compared to trying to find a needle in a haystack. As dawn broke on April 13, Columbia approached the Pacific Northwest to begin orbit twenty
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so convincing was to be asked by Kraft to join the next change-of-shift briefing alongside Don Puddy, boss of the Crimson Team, and Gene Kranz in the Public Affairs Office auditorium inside Building 2. Moser had never been asked to sit in on a briefing of that magnitude and knew
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could be unequivocal about what was known, what was still unknown about more critical areas of the heat shield dominated the rest of the briefing. Gene Kranz was asked what measures might be taken if damage to these more critical areas of the thermal protection system was discovered. His answer revealed the
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inside Building 30, the outgoing flight director, Chuck Lewis, left Mission Control and walked to the small briefing room in Building 2. There, once again, Gene Kranz was sitting in on the change-of-shift press conference. He was already braced for what was coming and, sure enough, the first question concerned
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. In the Mission Control room, though, the drapes were pulled back a little on the secret world. The reporter who’d detected a change in Gene Kranz earlier had been right. About an hour after the buzz first began to spread around Building 30, the deputy director of Flight Operations walked into
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a feeling strongly shared by Brandenstein. It was, he thought, a load off everybody’s minds. After he’d seen the photographs brought in by Gene Kranz, he could hand over the CapCom console to Joe Allen secure in the knowledge that he wasn’t passing his replacement a world of trouble
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during which communication between the spacecraft and Mission Control was impossible. Because the capsule was forced to reenter at a shallower angle than originally planned, Gene Kranz and his team of flight controllers in Houston had endured a blackout that persisted for nearly a minute and a half longer than expected. After
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Cube’s involvement was periodic comms checks with Sunnyvale in its capacity as a relay for the Indian Ocean tracking station, and the force of Gene Kranz’s refusal to be drawn out on his statement that NASA was using Department of Defense resources and looking at “all available data.” But the
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heat shield. At the time the reasons for their loss were unclear. Whether it signaled tile loss from more critical areas was unknown. Flight Director Gene Kranz, JSC Director Chris Kraft and Engineering Director Max Faget study the STS-1 telemetry inside Mission Control. Dr. Hans Mark, ex-director of the National
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ascends past 150,000 feet; Columbia’s discarded external tank: © NASA. page 3—Crippen and Young in aft crew station; tiles missing from heat shield; Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft and Max Faget; Dr. Hans Mark: © NASA. page 4—William Twinting: © NASA. Blue Cube: © USAF. Hubble Telescope; Cape Cod pictured from Columbia: © NASA
Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story
by Jeffrey Kluger · 11 Nov 2025 · 305pp · 98,394 words
an order, there was nothing a mere flight director could do but salute and obey. Kraft hung up the phone and sought out his deputy, Gene Kranz. Nine years Kraft’s junior, Kranz was a Korean War veteran who had flown serial combat missions over the southern half of the war-torn
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how the space game was played—and America would win it any way it could. * * * Maureen Bowen was not in the habit of barging into Gene Kranz’s Cape Canaveral office. Kranz, to be sure, was not the kind of man to stand on ceremony. He was very much still an assistant
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New Nine crewmen as soon as they arrived in town, and even chasing down less glamorous mission controllers and flight directors like Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz when there were no astronauts on hand to be interviewed. Still, it was the astronauts who were most prized. On July 29, 1964, when NASA
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clear to Kraft that he fully knew what the challenges were and instructed him to get them resolved. Kraft then nodded dutifully and sought out Gene Kranz, his deputy, instructing him to write the rules and flight plan necessary to make the EVA exercise possible. Kranz then offered his own dutiful nod
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mark further, the mission would likely be over. That matter, however, was for the next flight director to address. Kraft’s shift had ended, and Gene Kranz, his fast-rising deputy, was slated to take control for the next eight hours. Kraft, meantime, would go out and face the media for his
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’s Manned Spacecraft Center after Gemini 10 returned knew their lives were about to change. Already, mission controllers—not least among them Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz—had been transferred over to the Apollo program, with other, less senior flight directors tapped to take their places at their consoles. Both men found
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near the Manned Spacecraft Center, late on the Friday night of the fire—and then later at one another’s homes. NASA, James Webb, and Gene Kranz left them alone. But Monday morning, when they returned to work in Houston, Kranz summoned every one of the sorrowing men to the auditorium of
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; On the Shoulders of Titans by Barton C. Hacker and James M. Grimwood; Flight by Chris Kraft; Failure Is Not an Option by Gene Kranz; Tough and Competent by Gene Kranz; Project Gemini by Eugen Reichl; Project Gemini by the Charles River Editors; Moon Shot by Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton, Jay Barbree, and Howard
In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969
by Francis French, Colin Burgess and Walter Cunningham · 1 Jun 2010 · 628pp · 170,668 words
Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Apollo Moon Landings
by Jay Barbree, Howard Benedict, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton and Neil Armstrong · 1 Jan 1994 · 469pp · 124,784 words
Apollo 11: The Inside Story
by David Whitehouse · 7 Mar 2019 · 308pp · 87,238 words
Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight
by David A. Mindell · 3 Apr 2008 · 377pp · 21,687 words
The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low
by Richard Jurek · 2 Dec 2019 · 431pp · 118,074 words
Amazing Stories of the Space Age
by Rod Pyle · 21 Dec 2016
Of a Fire on the Moon
by Norman Mailer · 2 Jun 2014 · 477pp · 165,458 words
Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
by Andrew Smith · 3 Apr 2006 · 409pp · 138,088 words
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
by Adam Higginbotham · 14 May 2024 · 523pp · 204,889 words
Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey Into Space
by Stephen Walker · 12 Apr 2021 · 546pp · 164,489 words
Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle
by Dan Senor and Saul Singer · 3 Nov 2009 · 285pp · 81,743 words
The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt · 30 Sep 2017 · 345pp · 84,847 words
Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965
by Francis O. French, Colin Burgess and Paul Haney · 2 Jan 2007 · 647pp · 161,908 words
"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today
by Jay Barbree · 18 Aug 2008 · 386pp · 92,778 words
Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol · 13 Apr 2020 · 389pp · 112,319 words
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein · 1 Mar 2019 · 406pp · 109,794 words
The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space
by Eugene Cernan and Donald A. Davis · 1 Jan 1998 · 453pp · 142,717 words
Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements
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