Failure Is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (review)

Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond. By Gene Kranz. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000. Pp. 416. $14.

Failure Is Not an Option is Gene Kranz's epic personal account of the liftoff of the U.S. space program. Kranz was one of a select group recruited to develop the procedures, protocols, safety steps, and pre- and postflight regimes of the program and to administer NASA flight control. This small cadre of flight directors and controllers—taken from government posts, the military, and the aerospace industry—had to create Mission Control from scratch, inventing everything from the rules of flight to the hardware itself in a race to space with the Soviets. From the standpoint of a flight director, Kranz relates the evolution of the U.S. space program, flight by flight, through the completion of the Apollo missions.

Kranz is not a historian or a social scientist; this is a work of autobiography. He writes as if being interviewed, and while his stories can be riveting he frequently lapses into trite cold war clichés, jingoism, and at times appallingly egotistical reverie. Historians and social scientists interested in the genesis of contemporary technologies, technological systems, and systems evolution should be forewarned: Failure Is Not an Option is as much a celebration of Kranz's personal life (and that of his colleagues) as it is a critical examination of the development of the U.S. space program.

Notwithstanding the repeated and often distracting references to his growing family, to drinking episodes, and his own or his "comrades" masculine exploits, Kranz does deliver an account that explicitly develops the "human capital" side of NASA's space program. In this regard, he provides a welcome addition to the history of space flight through his focus on the behind-the-scenes determination of Mission Control and its flight directors, the folks who gave the astronauts—the usual heroes—the opportunity and confidence to become idols.

Kranz's narrative concerning the earliest days of the space program is probably the book's strongest contribution. Technologies were still rudimentary and little or no engineering foreknowledge could be relied on to direct activity at Cape Canaveral's Mission Control (the move from the Cape to Houston occurred circa 1962). Also of interest to historians of technology is Kranz's detailed version of the Apollo 13 mission from the perspective of the flight directors, as it was their leadership that brought Neil Armstrong and company home alive.

Few existing accounts relate the genesis of complex technological systems and the simultaneous and intersecting development of what Diane Vaughan referred to in her research on the Challenger disaster as NASA's "culture of production" from the inside out and the ground up. This process, Kranz frequently reminds the reader, relied almost completely on the intuition, savvy, and experiential acumen of these early space pioneers. What is more, while Kranz's account is atheoretical (personal biographies typically are), it does dovetail with historical and social-scientific analysis by organizational theorists such as Karl Weick and Karlene Roberts, and other "high reliability theory" scholars who claim that "cultures of reliability"—of the kind related in text by Kranz—are the bedrock for the successful and safe operation of technically complex and potentially catastrophic systems. Equally relevant, Kranz's recounting of the tragic loss of three astronauts in the capsule of Apollo 1 illustrates how normal accidents are in such tightly coupled and interactively complex systems.

Kranz concludes with a summary that outlines his opinion concerning "what has gone awry" with the U.S. space program, lamenting the unfinished business left to "a new generation of Americans" he hopes "will find the national leadership, spirit, and the courage to go boldly forward and complete what we [Kranz's generation] started" (p. 384).