Mission Possible

On a perfect autumn night for football in 1975, Gene Kranz raised his binoculars as a play unfolded below on the field inside Dickinson (Texas) High School’s Sam Vitanza Stadium. A son, one of his and his wife Marta’s six children, was playing that night and several others were either band members or cheerleaders. But Kranz’s gaze through the glasses swept past the gridiron to the golden globe of the Earth’s moon 240,000 miles away.

“Here’s this huge orb rising in the east over the stadium,” recalls Krantz, 70, a former NASA flight director. “I looked at it and knew just where the landing areas were. You could almost hear the echo of the crew, making their calls during the final seconds of the descent before they landed. It was just magical.”

It was a fitting moment of nostalgia for Kranz, who reigned over NASA’s Houston nerve center—Mission Control—during the heyday of America’s space program. The moon has played a central figure in Kranz’s phenomenal tenure of overseeing many of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. In 1969, he talked astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down for mankind’s first lunar landing, and in 1970 he played a pivotal role in the safe return of the crippled Apollo 13 spaceship.

On that fabled mission, an explosion in the service module oxygen system threatened available power, water, and air supplies. Suddenly, the unthinkable possibility of being stranded 205,000 miles from home became a grim consideration for astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert. It was the greatest drama ever played out on the live stage of NASA space launches.

“Gene made a very strategic decision that enabled the success of Apollo 13, setting up a brain trust to work through all the problems and devising an ultimate plan for solutions,” recalls Haise, the flight’s lunar module pilot, now retired in Texas. “They worked and enabled us to get home.”

In the hit 1995 movie Apollo 13, actor Ed Harris portrays Kranz and delivers an epic line to his fellow ground crew members in Mission Control, “Failure is not an option!” It’s become the major theme of Kranz’s post-NASA life.

“Actually, my exact words were, ‘We’ve never lost an American in space, and we sure as hell aren’t going to lose one now,’” Kranz recalls. “‘This crew is coming home.’”

One of Kranz’s flight dynamics officers, Jerry Bostick, actually gets credit for the legendary line, delivering the phrase not to the endangered astronauts, but to movie script people on the set looking to tighten Kranz’s original words of valor.

Failure Is Not an Option, the title of Kranz’s best-selling book, now is the thrust of a motivational message that he delivers to groups across the country. One of his favorite speaking stops is Houston’s School for Young Children, a facility for kids with learning and language difficulties. “I enjoy working with the kids, and I can see the message take hold,” Kranz says. “It’s in their eyes. That energy, that imagination is there.”

Kranz occasionally teams up with Haise for an inspirational duet. “Gene and I average a couple of motivational talks a year together,” Haise says. “It makes for an interesting ‘air/ground’ combination.”

And Krantz’s many triumphs with the space program still reap rewards. “My favorite moments have always been when I see people be incredibly successful, overcome difficulties, and inspire their teams to truly believe that failure is not an option,” he says.

Alan Ross is a freelance writer from Monteagle, Tenn.

Upload Your Own Stories, Photos and Videos

Every week, American Profile magazine brings you stories that celebrate the people and places that make America great. Now we want to hear your stories and see your photos, videos and even audio.

 Start Uploading Now!

 

Discuss this Article