Failure Is Not An Option

I picked up Apollo 13, the print version, for probably the fourth or fifth time recently. About a third of the way through the book, I went looking for the accounts of other Apollo team players. I came upon Gene Cranz's book, Failure Is Not An Option. Gene worked in Mission Control during the Gemini and Apollo missions. I enjoyed reading his accounts, especially of Apollo 11 and 13 and all you'll see from the excerpts that caught my attention, his analysis of the current state of the US space program was also noteworthy.

..."Failure is not an option." That was not true in the beginning of the space program. There had been many failures back then-because we hadn't learned enough about the perilous business in which we were engaged.

how long the flight took [from va to fl] on one of those old prop aircraft on any given day depended on the size of the bugs that hit the windshield and slowed it down.

As an American, I hated to see our nation second in anything-and I had no doubt we were second in space.

This [space] was a race we had to win and I wanted to be a part of it.

Mercury [America's first forays into space] worked because of the raw courage of a handful of men like Gordon Cooper, who sat in heavy metal eggcups jammed on the top of rockets, and trusted those of us on the ground. That trust tied the entire team into a common effort.

I had left behind a world where airplanes were flying at roughly five miles a minute. In this new, virtually uncharted world we would be moving at five miles per second. During a mission countdown, or even a flight test, so many things would be happening so fast that you did not have any time for second thoughts or arguments. You wanted the debate behind you. So before the mission, you held meetings to decide what to do if anything went wrong. You wrote down on paper the outcome of these meetings and this became what you needed for a launch, your personal list of Go NoGo's. There was no room in the process for emotion, no space for fear or doubt, no time to stop and think things over. A launch is an existential moment, much like combat. With no time to think about anything, you had to be prepared to respond to any contingency--and those contingencies had to be as fully anticipated as possible before you pushed the button. You also had to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the responsibilities of launch control and range safety. During a launch the only mission alternative to save the capsule was an abort, and we had to pick the points to act before the range safety officer stepped in to blow up the rocket and the capsule after launch if things went to hell.

...Apollo succeeded because at critical moments... the bosses had no hesitation about assigning crucial tasks to one individual, trusting his judgment, and then getting out of his way.

Success belonged to the team; failure was ultimately my responsibility.

When you turned loose the energy of a Saturn rocket, you simply had to have trust in your crew, your team, and in yourself. Through trust you reach a place where you can exploit opportunities, respond to failures, and make every second count."

A clear goal, a powerful mandate, and a unified team allowed the United States to move from a distant second in space into a preeminent position during my tenure at Mission Control

[In assessing the current space efforts]
...we stand with our feet firmly planted on the ground when we could be exploring the universe.

...we no longer try for new and bold space achievements; instead we celebrate the anniversaries of the past.

...President, John F. Kennedy, awakened us to our responsibilities and the opportunities we had to make our nation and our world better. Overnight it seemed we became a nation committed to causes... While we often moved to different cadences, our nation was alive with ideals. We were in motion. Violence was everywhere but so was conviction that we must somehow make this a better world.

We have become a nation of spectators, unwilling to take risks or act on strong beliefs.

Although NASA has an amazing array of technology and the most talented workforce in history, it lacks top-level vision. It began its retreat from the inherent risks of space exploration after the Challenger accident. During the last decade its retreat has turned into a rout.

The United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward... JFK


Tomorrow I'll correlate these thoughts with the dreams of putting a human on Mars.