Neil Hopcroft

[Audiobook]

Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz

It turns out that failure was an option, on my part at least. This was included for a limited time as a free title in my Audible subscription. I didn’t make it to the end before the time was up. Apollo 13 did come home, which was really the important bit, and I don’t think should be a spoiler for anyone reading this.

This book follows the Gemini and Apollo missions from the eyes of a flight controller. It captures the pioneering spirit of the early American space missions, giving some insight into how the missions came to be run the way they were and how the teamwork worked.

On the one hand there are observations about the risk taking, rolling the dice with every mission. Looking back now at what he describe terrifies me, they had no real idea what they were doing and happened to be lucky. Many times lucky, and sometimes unlucky.

There was also good use of mission simulations, played as ‘games’ of different failure modes – I don’t think they considered them games at the time, playing out these kinds of failure modes made the ground crew more familiar with what could be envisaged to go wrong, to prepare them for some actual failures – the Apollo 11 lander error code during descent had been played out in one of the later simulations which ended in dramatic failure – which meant they understood what to do when the code was thrown in the real mission.

The real highlight of the book (at least the three-quarters of it to which I got to listen) was bringing home the Apollo 13 – this was almost entirely down to luck, but they played out the scenarios on the ground to give themselves, their crew, more opportunity for luck – going around the moon bought some time for analysis without cutting off too many options, while jettisoning the lander would have left them only with an abort option.