[AR] Re: Steel And rockets?
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2021 14:35:09 -0400 (EDT)
On Thu, 22 Jul 2021, roxanna Mason wrote:
That's where the phrase got famous, so he said failure was NOT an option...
That phrase was never said at the time. It's associated with Kranz
because the Kranz character in the "Apollo 13" movie says it, and because
Kranz later used it as the title of his autobiography. But in fact it was
the movie scriptwriters who came up with it, building on a less elegant
phrase that flight controller Jerry Bostick said in an interview. Kranz
liked it as a summary of Mission Control's attitude, hence his title.
Note that he did not mean "failure cannot happen"; he meant "we will not
give up looking for ways to avert failure, no matter how bad things look".
And they looked pretty bad. The Apollo 13 crew were lucky; despite
Mission Control's determination to get them back alive, it was a very
close call.
if "success is expensive" and Apollo 13 was a successful failure then I
wonder how much that success was?
Apollo 13 was a failure, period -- it achieved none of its major
objectives. Moreover, it caused about a year's slip in the program
schedule, i.e. about a year's program budget accomplished almost nothing.
It also at least contributed to killing Apollos 18 and 19, because after
Apollo 13, NASA upper management rather lost enthusiasm for more flights,
worrying that the next accident *would* kill the crew.
Note that Peter was not talking about how much it costs to try to salvage
something from a failure. He was talking about how much it costs to try
to never have a failure (even disregarding the fact that, as witness
Apollo 13, this won't work).
Henry
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