Gene Kranz Quotations

I think everyone, once in his life, should be given a ticker-tape parade.

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.

There is no achievement without risk.

Failure is not an option.

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.

We had risen to probably one of the greatest challenges in history, put a man on the moon in the decade. We'd created incredible technologies. But what was most important, we'd created the teams, what I call the human factor. People who were energized by a mission.

There is no such thing as good enough. You, your team, and your equipment must be the best. That is how you will win victories.

That is our job, to live with this risk, and some days it's bad.

In 1960, ... the Cape looked like an oil field, with towering structures, dirt, and asphalt roads newly carved out of the palmetto scrub. The alligators were reluctantly surrendering to the onslaught of newly arrived civilization. If you didn't have a good sense of direction, you were in trouble.

The look on his face was something you see only a few times in your life, ... This horror grips you, becomes almost unimaginable in your ability to live with it. But that is our job, to live with the risk. This is the nature of people who hold lives in their hands.