His talk, "Failure is Not an Option," which was his charge to the team during the crisis (as well as the title of his career autobiography), put a personal face on those events so familiar to almost everyone and portrayed in the film "Apollo 13" starring Tom Hanks. Kranz' recollections stressed using technology and teamwork (vital to any engineering enterprise) to bring the crew back alive, despite numerous hurdles that cropped up, and the limited resources available on the spacecraft to overcome them.

One key he noted was the chemistry on the team, developed using training, simulations, and the knowledge gained from past space missions. Such a rigorous background is typified by the military adage, "You fight like you train, so train like you fight," and do it enough to keep honing the edge. Don't take anything for granted (a lesson learned from the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts) in order to insure mission safety and success.

In looking at my notes on Kranz' presentation, the word that appears most often is "trust"—absolute trust between mission control and the crew in space. He stressed his ground team needed to have more knowledge about spacecraft systems than the crew in order to preclude any second guessing (and the extra workload it involves) by the astronauts in space, which allowed them to better focus on the mission while lowering their stress level.

He concluded the mission was not over for the controllers until they handed it off to the navy once the crew was deposited on deck of the recovery carrier—and the cheering in the movie upon splashdown wouldn't have been tolerated—but the victory cigars certainly were, when the crew was safely aboard.

I ran into Gene Kranz in the hall after the presentation, and was able to tell him of the pride my father had in working on the Lunar Module at Grumman—especially so because the water supply system he was responsible for calibrating was vital to the Apollo 13 crew's survival—a job Kranz graciously acknowledged.