Gene Kranz might be the most important person to work at NASA who wasn’t an astronaut. Remember Ed Harris in Apollo 13? That character is based on Kranz though he writes that he never said, ‘Houston, we have a problem’. Kranz was at NASA early. He worked on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. Without procedures for what to do, he wrote down what they were doing. “Since there were no books written on the actual methodology of space flight, we had to write them as we went along.”
To Space: Kranz
To Space: Kranz
To Space: Kranz
Gene Kranz might be the most important person to work at NASA who wasn’t an astronaut. Remember Ed Harris in Apollo 13? That character is based on Kranz though he writes that he never said, ‘Houston, we have a problem’. Kranz was at NASA early. He worked on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. Without procedures for what to do, he wrote down what they were doing. “Since there were no books written on the actual methodology of space flight, we had to write them as we went along.”