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Posted on Sun, Nov. 01, 2009

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Former NASA icon to speak in Wichita

BY DION LEFLER

The Wichita Eagle

The most famous thing Gene Kranz ever said, he didn't say — at least not while he was fighting to save three astronauts stranded in the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft.

"Failure is not an option" was a line grafted onto actual Kranz quotes for Ed Harris, the actor who portrayed him in the movie "Apollo 13."

"It was kind of a motto we had," Kranz said. "I never said it during the course of a mission."

But the quote has stuck with Kranz — it was the title of his book about the space program.

And it sums up the attitude of the man who was NASA's longtime flight director, who guided America's astronauts to the first moon landing and who won lasting fame and a Presidential Medal of Freedom for leading the team that brought the Apollo 13 crew home safely after an explosion aboard their moon-bound spacecraft.

Kranz will be the featured speaker Nov. 17 at the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce's annual meeting.

He said he plans to talk about the early days of the space program and the dedication, determination and teamwork — on the ground and in space — that went into putting men on the moon.

One might think that guiding Apollo 11, the first manned spacecraft to land on another world, would have been the moment of elation of a lifetime. Kranz said it actually was incredibly stressful, and he and his team didn't have the time to pop any champagne corks.

As the lunar lander descended to the surface, it used more fuel than expected, touching down with 17 seconds worth of fuel left in the tank, Kranz said.

Immediately after transmission of the historic message, "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed," Kranz and his crew were plowing through instrument readings to determine whether it was safe for the astronauts to stay on the lunar surface.

"While everyone else was celebrating, we ended up staked to our consoles for the next two hours," he recalled.

In addition to Apollos 11 and 13, Kranz rattled off a list of what he considers some of his best days at NASA, including:

* In 1965, when Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 rendezvoused in orbit, showing that the U.S. had taken the lead over the Soviet Union in the space race.

* In 1968, when Apollo 8 became the first craft to orbit the moon.

* In 1969, four months after Apollo 11, when Apollo 12 accomplished a precisely targeted landing on the moon.

To Kranz, the 1960s were a golden age when scientists, engineers and technicians — challenged by President Kennedy and backed by the will of the nation — developed the technology, procedures and teamwork to achieve what many believed impossible.

They had to start from scratch at a time when "aerospace was not even a discipline" in colleges, Kranz said.

Modern computers, communications, navigation, weather forecasting, even freeze-dried foods all had their roots in the space program — along with countless other advances.

"What would our economy be today if we hadn't done it?" Kranz asked.

Today, space exploration doesn't capture the public's imagination as it did in its heyday of the 1960s, when missions merited wall-to-wall coverage on all three national television networks.

Kranz noted that few people watched last week's launch of the Ares X-1, the rocket being developed to return the United States to the moon with the eventual goal of reaching Mars.

Kranz said the American public is very fickle and that NASA has to "continue to amaze" to keep its attention.

As a group, Americans are also much more risk-averse than they were in the early days of the space program, Kranz said.

And risk is a huge part of space exploration.

While Kranz found it hard to cite a single milestone as his best day at NASA, he said, "The worst day is an easy one: the day we lost the Apollo 1 crew."

That was Jan. 27, 1967, when fire broke out in what was planned to be a shakedown flight for the rocket designed to carry men to the moon.

The fire, on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., killed astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Roger B. Chaffee and Edward H. White II.

Kranz defended the space program's record, saying he'd put its three fatal accidents in about 50 years — Apollo 1 and the losses of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia — up against just about any other human venture.

"I doubt if anybody in the aircraft industry could match that record," he said.

He said few people realize the complexity of creating a livable bubble in the deadly vacuum of space, or building flying machines that won't fall apart at 25 times the speed of sound.

In the end, space flight is about perfection. A pinpoint failure anywhere along the way can have fatal consequences, as it did with the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the Columbia breakup in 2003, Kranz said.

But it's part of the job.

Or, as Kranz put it, "Risk is the price of progress."

Reach Dion Lefler at 316-268-6527.