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Title details for Failure Is Not an Option by Gene Kranz - Available

Failure Is Not an Option

Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond

by Gene Kranz
Danny Campbell
Audiobook
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Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA's Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race. He helped to launch Alan Shepard and John Glenn, then assumed the flight director's role in the Gemini program, which he guided to fruition. With his teammates, he accepted the challenge to carry out President John F. Kennedy's commitment to land a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s.


Kranz was flight director for both Apollo 11, the mission in which Neil Armstrong fulfilled President Kennedy's pledge, and Apollo 13. He headed the Tiger Team that had to figure out how to bring the three Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth. (In the film Apollo 13, Kranz was played by the actor Ed Harris, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance.)


In Failure Is Not an Option, Gene Kranz recounts these thrilling historic events and offers new information about the famous flights. What appeared as nearly flawless missions to the moon were, in fact, a series of hair-raising near misses. When the space technology failed, as it sometimes did, the controllers' only recourse was to rely on their skills and those of their teammates. Kranz takes us inside Mission Control and introduces us to some of the whiz kids—still in their twenties, only a few years out of college—who had to figure it all out as they went along, creating a great and daring enterprise. He reveals behind-the-scenes details to demonstrate the leadership, discipline, trust, and teamwork that made the space program a success.


Finally, Kranz reflects on what has happened to the space program and offers his own bold suggestions about what we ought to be doing in space now.


This is a fascinating firsthand account written by a veteran mission controller of one of America's greatest achievements.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 30, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781452623900
      • File size: 525462 KB
      • Duration: 18:14:42

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Author Gene Kranz was a flight director for Mission Control during all the major space expeditions of the earliest days of NASA. He took the helm for both the moon landing and the infamous Apollo 13 mission. Narrator Danny Campbell delivers a simple, understated performance and largely allows the material to speak for itself. These incredible stories will thrill listeners of all ages, whether they watched the missions on television or they've never even heard of the Apollo program. Campbell's delivery is steady and focused; he keeps listeners engaged for the duration of the book, even when some of Kranz's stories seem to lag slightly from the sheer weight of his experiences. L.B. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 10, 2000
      When the heroic American astronauts of the '60s and '70s inquired, "Houston, do you read?" it was often Krantz's team who answered from the ground. Veteran NASA flight controller Krantz (portrayed by Ed Harris in the film Apollo 13) has written a personable memoir, one that follows his and NASA's careers from the start of the space race through "the last lunar strike," Apollo 17 (1972-1973). Krantz's story opens in the world of the first U.S. space scientists, of exploding Mercury-Atlas rockets, flaming escape towers and "the first rule of flight control": "If you don't know what to do, don't do anything!" Its climax is Apollo 13, with Krantz serving as "lead flight director" and helping to save the trapped astronauts' lives. His account of that barely averted disaster evokes the adrenalized mood of the flight controllers and the technical problems ("gimbal lock," oxygen status, return trajectories) that had to be solved for the astronauts to survive. Elsewhere in these often-gripping pages we learn of the quarrels that almost derailed Gemini 9A's spacewalk; "the best leaders the program ever had," among them George Mueller, who revived NASA after a 1966 launchpad fire; the forest of internal acronyms and argot ("Go-NoGo," "all-up," EVA, the Trench, CSM, GNC, FIDO, RETRO, GUIDO); and the combination of teamwork and expertise that made the moon landings possible. Plenty of books (and several films) have already tried to depict the space program's excitement; few of their creators had the first-person experience or the attention to detail Krantz has, whose role as flight control "White" his readers will admire or even wish to emulate. Eight b&w photos.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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