Gene Kranz
Gene Kranz ran Mission Control in a close-cut flattop and a handmade vest, a different one for each mission. His wife, Marta Kranz, sewed the waistcoats in varied styles and materials for his Flight Director shifts. Beneath the tailoring was Eugene Francis Kranz, an American aerospace engineer who became NASA's second Chief Flight Director. He directed missions in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Movies, documentaries, books and magazine articles have all taken him as a subject. In a 2010 Space Foundation survey, only Neil Armstrong ranked above him as a favorite space hero.
How did a boy from an Ohio farm end up at that console? What did he say to his team in the grim days after a deadly disaster? And why does the most famous line attached to his name trace back to someone else?
Eugene Kranz was born on the 17th of August 1933 in Toledo, Ohio, and grew up on a farm overlooking the Willys-Overland Jeep production plant. His father, Leo Peter Kranz, was the son of German immigrants and had served as an Army medic in World War I. Leo died in 1940, when Eugene was only seven. Eugene had two older sisters, Louise and Helen, and he attended Central Catholic High School.
At Central Catholic, Kranz wrote a thesis titled The Design and Possibilities of the Interplanetary Rocket. It argued for a single-stage rocket that could fly all the way to the Moon.
In 1951 he finished high school and went to college. By 1954 he held a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical Engineering from Saint Louis University's Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and completed pilot training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas in 1955.
Shortly after earning his wings, Kranz married Marta Cadena. Her parents were Mexican immigrants who had fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. The Air Force then sent him to South Korea, where he flew the F-86 Sabre on patrols around the Korean DMZ.
After that tour, Kranz left active service and joined McDonnell Aircraft Corporation. At the Air Force's research center at Holloman Air Force Base, he helped research and test new surface-to-air and air-to-ground missiles. He was discharged from the Air Force Reserve as a Captain in 1972.
When the Holloman tests were finished, he made the move that shaped his life. He left McDonnell for the Space Task Group, then based at the Langley Research Center in Virginia.
Christopher C. Kraft, a flight director, gave Kranz his first NASA assignment: procedures officer for the uncrewed Mercury-Redstone 1 test. Kranz's autobiography nicknames that flight the Four-Inch Flight, because the rocket never actually left the pad.
As Procedures Officer, Kranz tied Mercury Control to the Launch Control Team at Cape Canaveral, Florida. He wrote the Go/NoGo procedures, the rules that decided whether a mission continued or was aborted. He also worked like a switchboard operator, using Teletype to link the Cape with fourteen tracking stations and two tracking ships around the globe.
He filled that role on every Mercury flight, crewed or uncrewed. That included MR-3 and MA-6, which put the first Americans into space and into orbit.
In May 1962 Kranz became an Assistant Flight Director for MA-7, the flight of Scott Carpenter, serving under Kraft. The source credits the rescue of that mission to the whole of Mission Control. It adds that Kranz and Kraft played a major part.
Kranz kept the assistant role for the last two Mercury flights and the first three Gemini flights. Gemini 4 in 1965 brought his first shift as a full Flight Director, the so-called operations shift. That mission carried the first U.S. spacewalk and lasted four days.
Then came Apollo. Kranz served as Flight Director on odd-numbered missions, including Apollos 1, 5, 7 and 9. Apollo 5 was the first and only successful uncrewed test of the Lunar Module. On the 20th of July 1969, he was Flight Director for Apollo 11 when the Lunar Module Eagle landed on the Moon.
Kranz was among the first flight directors picked to fly crewed Apollo missions. He also became a division chief, responsible for mission preparation, mission design, written procedures and handbooks. Mercury and Gemini had used McDonnell-Douglas as contractor, but Apollo brought in Rockwell. Kranz describes Rockwell as unfamiliar with the space industry, since it was known for aeronautics.
Time, he says, set Apollo apart, because earlier programs had ample schedules and this one did not. He and James Otis Covington wrote the flight control section of a NASA book titled What Made Apollo a Success? Apollo 1, first on that odd-numbered list, would become the mission that redefined what his division stood for.
On the Monday morning after the Apollo 1 disaster, Kranz gathered his branch and flight control team. The disaster had killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. He opened with a blunt line: "Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect."
He then took the blame on himself and his colleagues. "Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up," he said. He told them the flaw might have been in design, build or test, but that they should have caught it. In his words, "We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work."
He listed what had been going wrong. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in nearly every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. "Nothing we did had any shelf life," he said. He added, "Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!'"
Kranz did not yet know what the committee under Thompson would conclude. He knew his own verdict: "We are the cause! We were not ready!" He said they had been rolling the dice and hoping things would come together by launch day.
Then he gave Flight Control its new identity. "From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: 'Tough' and 'Competent,'" he said. Tough meant being forever accountable for what they did or failed to do. Competent meant never taking anything for granted.
He ordered everyone to write "Tough and Competent" on their blackboards, and he said it would never be erased. In his words, these words were "the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."
After the Space Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe quoted this speech while discussing what should change. He said, "These words are the price of admission to the ranks of NASA and we should adopt it that way."
Kranz has also given his own reading of the Mission Control logo. He ties it to commitment, teamwork, discipline, morale, risk and sacrifice, along with the same two words, tough and competent.
The first three Flight Directors chose red, white and blue as their identifying colors, and each team was called by its color followed by the word Flight. Kranz was White Flight, leader of the White Team. That tradition continues at Mission Control to this day.
Kranz is perhaps best known as lead flight director on Apollo 13, the crewed Moon landing mission. His team was on duty when part of the Service Module exploded, and it handled the first hours of the unfolding accident. The press dubbed the White Team the Tiger Team.
The team set limits on how much oxygen, electricity and water the spacecraft could use. It controlled the three course-correction burns on the trans-Earth trajectory. It also directed the power-up procedures that let the astronauts land safely in the command module.
NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine, in communications with Richard Nixon, recommended that Kranz and his team receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Kranz's honors list shows the medal in 1970.
Apollo 13 never reached its main objective. Even so, Kranz treats the astronauts' rescue as a prime example of what he calls the human factor, born in the 1960s space race. He credits that factor with much of why the United States reached the Moon in only a decade. Young, intelligent people working day after day on sheer willpower produced what he calls the right stuff.
Kranz described those people this way: "They were people who were energized by a mission. And these teams were capable of moving right on and doing anything America asked them to do in space."
Another example he gives is the ingenuity of the teams that built emergency plans and sequences as new problems surfaced during Apollo 13. He also points to companies such as Grumman, which developed the Apollo Lunar Module, along with North American Aviation and the Lockheed Corporation. After the 1960s, these companies dissolved in corporate mergers. Lockheed, for one, became Lockheed Martin.
In the 1995 film Apollo 13, actor Ed Harris, portraying Kranz, speaks the line "failure is not an option." Kranz borrowed it as the title of his 2000 autobiography. In 2004 the History Channel adapted it for a documentary about Mission Control, followed by the 2005 sequel Beyond the Moon: Failure Is Not an Option 2. Kranz also travels the world giving a motivational lecture under the same title, including in the historic Apollo 13 flight control room.
Yet Kranz never used the phrase. Screenwriter Bill Broyles coined it, building on a remark from Jerry Bostick, an FDO flight controller on the Apollo 13 Mission Control crew.
Bostick recalled that Broyles and fellow screenwriter Al Reinart came down to Clear Lake to interview him about what the people in Mission Control were really like. They asked whether there were moments when everyone, or at least a few people, simply panicked. Bostick answered, "No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them." He added, "We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution."
Bostick noticed Broyles seemed eager to leave and assumed he was bored. Only months later did he learn what happened in the car. Broyles started screaming, "That's it! That's the tag line for the whole movie, Failure is not an option. Now we just have to figure out who to have say it."
The filmmakers gave the line to the Kranz character. Bostick summed up the rest in his own words: "Of course, they gave it to the Kranz character, and the rest is history."
Kranz remained a Flight Director through Apollo 15 and Apollo 17. On Apollo 17, he worked his final flight director shift, overseeing the liftoff. In 1974 he became Deputy Director of NASA Mission Operations, and in 1983 he became Director.
On the 28th of January 1986, he was in Mission Control when Space Shuttle Challenger was lost on the STS-51-L launch. He retired from NASA in 1994, after STS-61 repaired the optically flawed Hubble Space Telescope in 1993.
In spring 2000, someone asked Kranz whether NASA was still the place it had been in the space race. He replied, "No. In many ways we have the young people, we have the talent, we have the imagination, we have the technology." Then came the caveat: "But I don't believe we have the leadership and the willingness to accept risk, to achieve great goals."
He thought the human factor had largely dried up after the Moon landings. The United States, he said, had treated them as a short-term goal to beat the Soviet Union and not much more.
His autobiography carried a chapter-length warning. He wrote that, lacking a clear goal, NASA had become "just another federal bureaucracy beset by competing agendas." He said its retreat from the risks of exploration began after the Challenger accident and had become a rout in the following decade. He hoped the 2000 national election would let a new President choose leadership committed to rebuilding the agency.
In retirement, Kranz served as a flight engineer on a restored Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, flying at air shows across the United States for six years. He kept giving motivational speeches about his experiences in the space programs.
Starting in 2017, he helped launch and direct the restoration of the Mission Control Room at the Johnson Space Center. The goal was to return it to the look and function it had during Apollo 11 in 1969. The five million dollar project was meant to finish in time for the 50th anniversary of that mission.
On the 23rd of October 2018, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner declared "Gene Kranz Day." That year, at the "To the Moon and Beyond" luncheon hosted by Space Center Houston, the Gene Kranz Scholarship began, funding young students in STEM training and activities.
In the fall of 2019, the Ohio State Legislature introduced House Bill 358 to make the 17th of August "Gene Kranz Day." The Ohio House passed it in May 2020. As of 2025, it still sits at the committee stage in the Senate.
Kranz, a Catholic, has six children with Marta: Carmen, born in 1958, Lucy in 1959, Joan Frances in 1961, Mark in 1963, Brigid in 1964 and Jean Marie in 1966. In a NASA article titled Lessons from My Father, his youngest daughter Jeannie called him a very "engaged" father. She likened him to Ward Cleaver from the television show Leave it to Beaver.
The honors began early. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics gave him its Lawrence Sperry Award in 1967. He received NASA's Distinguished Service Medal in 1970-1982 and 1988. He entered the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2015, and Saint Louis University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science that same year. In 2021 the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum gave him the Michael Collins Trophy for Lifetime Achievement.
The screen has revisited him often. Ed Nelson played Kranz in the 1974 TV movie Houston, We've Got a Problem, the first portrayal. Ed Harris followed in the 1995 film Apollo 13, and Matt Frewer played him in the 1996 TV movie Apollo 11. Dan Butler took the role in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. John Brotherton portrayed him in a 2016 episode of Timeless titled "Space Race." Eric Ladin plays him in the 2019 Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, whose alternate history makes the character partly fictional.
Documentaries have drawn on NASA film archives to show him, including the 2008 Discovery Channel production When We Left Earth and the 2017 David Fairhead film Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo. His name and voice also appear in archive clips on the track "Go!" from the 2015 Public Service Broadcasting album The Race for Space. In the videogame Kerbal Space Program, Mission Control is a character named Gene Kerman.
Places carry his name too. Eugene Kranz Junior High School stands in Dickinson, Texas. In 2020, Toledo Express Airport in his home city became officially the Eugene F. Kranz Toledo Express Airport.
In 2025, Seiko launched the SRPL91 and SRPL93, nicknamed "Gene Kranz." They reissue the original Seiko 5, the watch Kranz wore during the Apollo 11 mission.
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Common questions
Who is Gene Kranz?
Gene Kranz, born Eugene Francis Kranz on the 17th of August 1933, is an American aerospace engineer who served as NASA's second Chief Flight Director. He directed missions in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.
What did Gene Kranz do during Apollo 13?
Gene Kranz was lead flight director of the White Team during Apollo 13. His team set limits on oxygen, electricity and water use, controlled three course-correction burns, and directed the power-up procedures that let the astronauts land safely in the command module.
What is the Kranz Dictum?
The Kranz Dictum is the speech Gene Kranz gave his flight control team on the Monday morning after the Apollo 1 disaster. It declared that Flight Control would be known by two words, "Tough" and "Competent."
Did Gene Kranz really say "failure is not an option"?
Gene Kranz never used the phrase. Screenwriter Bill Broyles coined it for the 1995 film Apollo 13, based on a remark by Apollo 13 flight controller Jerry Bostick.
What is the Gene Kranz autobiography called?
Gene Kranz published his autobiography in 2000 under the title Failure Is Not An Option. The title borrows a line from the 1995 film Apollo 13, in which Ed Harris portrays Kranz.
When did Gene Kranz retire from NASA?
Gene Kranz retired from NASA in 1994, after the STS-61 flight that repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993. He had become Director of Mission Operations in 1983.
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28 references cited across the entry
- 3NewsNASA legend Gene Kranz reflects on career in new book, two days out from 90th birthdayAndrew Dansby — Aug 6, 2023
- 4BookBefore this decade is out: personal reflections on the Apollo ProgramDover Publications — 2012
- 5BookFailure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and BeyondGene Kranz — Simon & Schuster — 2009
- 7AIAA Scitech 2020 ForumMaya Nasr — American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics — January 5, 2020
- 8BookWhat Made Apollo a Success?National Aeronautics and Space Administration — 2014
- 9NewsCOLUMN ONE : Apollo's Unseen TitanRobert Hotz — July 3, 1994
- 10BookFailure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and BeyondGene Kranz — Simon and Schuster — June 23, 2009
- 11Gene Kranz's Apollo VestOwen Edwards
- 21Lessons from My FatherJeannie Kranz
- 22'For All Mankind' to launch alternate space race on Apple TV+October 28, 2019
- 27Members of Apollo 13 Team Reflect on 'NASA's Finest HourNASA — April 17, 2015
- 28National Aviation Hall of Fame reveals names of four to be enshrined in "Class of 2015"National Aviation Hall of Fame — December 16, 2014