Houston Chronicle by Andrew Dansby June 17, 2019
Gene Kranz didn’t set out to be a writer of thrillers. But moments in his memoir ring with the tension of a white-knuckle novel. Take this passage, as NASA prepared for the Apollo 11 moon landing:
“If there was one word guaranteed to get your attention in Mission Control, it is the word ‘abort.’ This word is never used casually and literally rings across the voice loops as the word is passed to the crew, computer controllers and support personnel. … In an abort your chances of getting out alive are good if the abort is done at the right time. If you are off the timeline, your chances are not good 200,000 miles away from home.â€
The brilliant and level-headed people working in Mission Control during the Apollo program are often treated as a hive mind, and in defense of that presentation: They worked as a remarkably complex collective of complementary parts. None of them had their work marked by large-scale parades the way some of the astronauts did. But the stakes were nevertheless high in their work, and the burden of lives on the line fell on their shoulders.
Which is why the deaths of three astronauts during a test exercise for what became known as Apollo 1 weighed heavily on all involved.
And Kranz defined a philosophy for NASA going forward from that tragedy. “Tough and competent†was his mantra, part of a pledge to push forward to the moon but in a manner meticulously calibrated to maximize the safety of the men on top of all that rocket fuel.
Kranz emerged as something of a star among this set of Mission Control principals in a roundabout way. He possessed — and still possesses — a magnetic military manner; he knows well the dramatic sound of his voice. But Kranz’s renown as a face of 1960s Mission Control also owes some debt to “Apollo 13,†Ron Howard’s feature film that cast a stern and charismatic Ed Harris as Kranz.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/space/mission-moon/article/For-Kranz-failure-was-not-an-option-13986477.phpI never worked with Gene, but I had the pleasure to work with his daughter Joan for several years.
