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Comment by bernardom | Hacker News Reader

The other classic (and definitely an HN-appropriate book) is "Failure Is Not an Option," which gives an awesome look at the engineering and management challenges they faced from Mercury to Apollo.

https://smile.amazon.com/Failure-Not-Option-Mission-Control/...

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I think the best is "Flight" -- the memoir of NASA's first director of mission control

https://www.amazon.com/Flight-My-Life-Mission-Control/dp/052...

The title, it should be disclaimed, is not what the astronauts or flight controllers believed. It's a poor abbreviation of the following:

"No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution."

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kranz#.22Failure_is_not_a...

I've read the book, and Kranz definitely says at least once that the phrase "failure is not an option" is a good summary of what the flight controllers believed. Could you perhaps elaborate on what you mean by your comment?

As Kranz lays out in the book (and as indicated in the wiki) "Failure is not an option" was written by the Apollo 13 screenwriters. The original quote was by the FIDO at the time which was adapted for the movie. Kranz has since started using it as it summarizes the idea more succinctly.

I understand. I was asking for an elucidation of the comment that it was "not what the astronauts or flight controllers believed" and is a "poor abbreviation".

Thanks for that link to Gene Kranz's wiki. The guy was a real hero, and an understated one at that.

Absolutely!

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