Failure is not an option

Common card · No. 460544

"Failure is not an option" is a phrase associated with NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz and the Apollo 13 Moon landing mission. Although Kranz is often attributed with having spoken those words during the mission, he did not actually say the phrase. The origin of the phrase is from the preparation for the 1995 film Apollo 13 according to FIDO Flight Controller Jerry Bostick: In preparation for the movie, the script writers, Al Reinert and Bill Broyles, came down to Clear Lake to interview me on "What are the people in Mission Control really like?" One of their questions was "Weren't there times when everybody, or at least a few people, just panicked?" My answer was "No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them." ... I immediately sensed that Bill Broyles wanted to leave and assumed that he was bored with the interview. Only months later did I learn that when they got in their car to leave, he started screaming, "That's it! That's...

Read on Wikipedia · Image User N328KF on en.wikipedia, Public domain