Failure Is Not An Option

Francis Eugene "Gene" Kranz (born August 17, 1933) is a former flight director at NASA and manager. Kranz served as flight director, the successor of the founder NASA flight director Chris Kraft, during the Gemini and Apollo programs. He is best known for his role in directing the successful efforts of the team monitoring mission to save the crew of Apollo 13, which later became the subject of a major film of the same name. He is also known for his trademark flattop haircut, and wearing dapper white "mission" vests (waistcoats) of different styles and materials, made by Mrs Kranz, during the missions for which he served as flight director. A personal friend to American astronauts of his era, Kranz remains an iconic figure and colourful figure in the history of manned space exploration in the United States. Literally, the embodiment of the "NASA tough-and-competent" Kranz Dictum. Kranz was the subject of films, documentary films, books and periodical articles. Kranz is the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Eugene F. Kranz, flight director, is shown at his console on May 30, 1965, in the Mission Operations Control Room in the Mission Control Center at Houston during a Gemini-Titan IV simulation to prepare for the four-day, 62-orbit flight. (NASA Photo S-65-22203.)

Gene Krantz was in charge when Apollo 13 had a problem.....

After completing the research tests at Holloman Air Force Base, Kranz left McDonnell-Douglas and joined the NASA Space Task Group, then at its Langley Research Center in Virginia. Upon joining NASA, he was assigned, by flight director Christopher C. Kraft, as a Mission Control procedures officer for the unmanned MR-1 test (dubbed in Kranz's autobiography as the "Four-Inch Flight", due to its failure to launch).
As Procedures Officer, Kranz was put in charge of integrating Mercury Control with the Launch Control Team at Cape Canaveral, Florida, writing up the "Go/NoGo" procedures that allowed missions to continue as planned or be aborted, along with serving as a sort of switchboard operator between the control center at Cape Canaveral and the agency's fourteen tracking stations and two tracking ships (via Teletype) located across the globe. Kranz performed this role for all unmanned and manned Mercury flights, including the trailblazing MR-3 and MA-6 flights, which put the first Americans into space and orbit respectively.
After MA-6, he was promoted to Assistant Flight Director to Flight Director Kraft for the MA-7 flight of astronaut Scott Carpenter in October, 1962. He continued in this role for the remaining two Mercury flights and the first three Gemini flights. With the upcoming Gemini flights, he was promoted to the Flight Director level and served his first shift, the so-called "operations shift," for the Gemini 4 mission in 1965, the first U.S. EVA and four-day flight. After Gemini, he served as a Flight Director on odd-numbered Apollo missions, including Apollos 7 and 9. He was the Flight Director for Apollo 11, during the moment when the Lunar Module Eagle landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969.
Kranz is perhaps best known for his role as lead Flight Director during the Apollo 13 space mission. Kranz's team was on duty when the Apollo 13 Service Module exploded, and they dealt with the initial hours of the unfolding accident. His "White Team", dubbed the "Tiger Team" by the press, set the constraints for the consumption of spacecraft consumables (oxygen, electricity and water), controlled the three course-correction burns during the trans-Earth trajectory, as well as the power-up procedures that allowed the astronauts to use the Command Module for the trip home. He, his team, as well as the astronauts received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their heroic roles.
Kranz would continue as a Flight Director through Apollo 17, the end of the Apollo missions, and then was promoted to Deputy Director of NASA Mission Operations in 1974, becoming Director in 1983. He retired from NASA in 1994 after the successful STS-61 flight that repaired the optically flawed Hubble Space Telescope in 1993. In addition to having written Failure Is Not An Option, which was adapted for cable TV for The History Channel in 2004, he also flies an aerobatic aircraft and serves as a flight engineer for a restored B-17 Flying Fortress. He and his wife Marta, along with their six children (one boy and five girls) and several grandchildren, still reside in Texas.