GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
GENE KRANZ

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, Dammit, stop! I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.

From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: Tough — and Competent.

Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.

Gene Kranz

NASA Flight Director, address to flight control team on the Monday morning following the Apollo 1 disaster. Since known as the Kranz Dictum. 30 January 1967.

Freedom 7 is still go, the trajectory is A-OK. Mission is still A-OK, full go.

John 'Shorty' Powers

NASA Public Affairs Officer, the voice of Mercury Control, at launch of rocket carrying America’s first man in space, 5 May 1961. Often attributed to Alan Shepard, but the astronaut’s didn't like the phrase, and the NASA publication, This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, says in a footnote that a replay of the flight voice communications tape disclosed that Shepard himself did not use the term. Flight Controller Gene Kranz said in the 2000 book Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond:

“Shorty Powers announced to the world that “everything is A-OK,” a phrase hated by the controllers and crews as “too Hollywood,” but one that soon became a part of the American vocabulary. It seems quaint now, all these years later, virtually unused, almost forgotten.”

The 1979 book The Right Stuff says Powers had borrowed the expression from NASA engineers who used it during radio transmission tests because “the sharper sound of A cut through the static better than O”. It became a spaceage idiom for ‘everything is going smoothly’.

Failure is not an option.

Attributed to Gene Kranz

In the 1995 movie Apollo 13, this line is spoken by legendary NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz, played by Ed Harris, but there is no evidence that Kranz ever said it before the movie's release.



However, Gene later used it as the title of his 2000 book, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond. In the book, he described it as “a creed that we all lived by” (page 12) and wrote, “Failure does not exist in the lexicon of a flight controller. The universal characteristic of a controller is that he will never give up until he has an answer or another option” (page 307). Kranz uses the phrase multiple times throughout the book but never directly claims it as his own or that it was ever formally articulated as it is known today.

Jerry C. Bostick, the Flight Dynamics Officer (FDO) for Apollo 13, wrote that screenwriters Al Reinart and Bill Broyles interviewed him about the atmosphere in Mission Control. He recalled the conversation:

One of their questions was, “Weren’t there times when everybody, or at least a few people, just panicked?” My answer was, “No. When bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution.”

Bostick noted that Bill Broyles seemed eager to leave, and only months later did he learn why. When the screenwriters got in their car, Broyles reportedly exclaimed, “That's it! That’s the tagline for the whole movie—‘Failure is not an option.’ Now we just have to figure out who to have say it.” Of course, they gave the line to the Kranz character, and the rest is history. The phrase certainly captures the ‘human factors’ mindset of NASA Mission Control in the 1960s. However, it was created for a movie, condensed from real-life attitudes rather than being a direct historical quote.