"Failure is not an option!"

Thanks to my oldest daughter who reminded me that today, April 17th, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Apollo 13 mission.  The three astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise, left Earth on a mission to the moon (incidentally, only the third mission that was scheduled to land on the moon), but as was depicted in the 1995 Ron Howard film, Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, the late Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris, the lunar landing was aborted when an oxygen tank in the service module failed two days out from Earth.  Instead, the crew looped around the moon and returned to Earth, splashing down in the South Pacific on April 17, 1970.

It is an incredible story, perhaps best illustrated by Ed Harris' character Gene Kranz (Flight Director) in the 1995 film, who said, "Failure is not an option!"  The phrase was certainly apocryphal, and even though Kranz never really said it in exactly the same way as depicted in the movie, the quote reflects the attitude of the entire team at Mission Control during the crisis.  The full line goes like this:

We've never lost an American in spcace, and we're sure as hell not going to lose one on my watch.  Failure is not an option!

Kranz reportedly liked the line so much, it became the title of his 2000 autobiography.  But what is interesting here, and perhaps it is obvious, is that the "failure is not an option" wasn't always the creed by which Mission Control lived by at NASA.  If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know I like to reference the concept that some organizations, called High Reliability Organizations, have an impressive track record of safety - close to perfection, really, in terms of serious accidents - yet operate on a daily basis under dangerous conditions.  Examples of High Reliability Organizations (HROs) have included nuclear power plants, aircraft carrier flight operations, and commercial aviation, among others.  What is interesting here, at least to me, is that these HROs not only tolerate failure, they take great pains to learn from every single failure.  These organizations fully recognize that any operation that involves humans, by nature, is not going to perfect.

Learning from failure is one of the defining characteristics of HROs ("Preoccupation with Failure").  HROs minimize the impact of these failures by (1) learning from each and every single mistake (certainly by conducting an in-depth analysis of all failures, no matter how small, but also by understanding and comprehending what goes on throughout the organization - "Sensitivity to Operations"), (2) refusing to accept the simple answer ("Reluctance to Simplify"), (3) pushing down decision-making to frontline leaders whenever possible, but particularly during a crisis ("Deference to Expertise"), and (4) developing redundant and resilient systems to minimize the impact of errors when they do occur ("Commitment to Resilience"). 

Of course, the story of Gene Kranz and NASA goes deeper than just Apollo 13.  Few of us remember (and maybe not all of us were alive at the time) what happened with Apollo 1.  During a dress rehearsal of the Apollo 1 launch on January 27, 1967, a cabin fire resulted in the deaths of all three astronauts - Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White III, and Roger Chaffee.  Manned Apollo flights were suspended for 20 months  while both NASA and Congress conducted an Accident Review Board.  The source of the fire was subsequently determined to be electrical in nature (very similar to what caused the accident on Apollo 13, I might add), causing a fire that spread rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the command module's cabin.  The three astronauts were trapped inside because the door hatch could not be opened against the internal pressure of the cabin.  In addition, the dress rehearsal had been considered low risk and not hazardous, so the team's were not fully prepared or ready to conduct rescue operations.

Following the accident (actually on the Monday morning following the Apollo 1 disaster), Gene Kranz famously said the following, which has come to be known as "The Kranz Dictum":

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. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, "Dammit, stop!" I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did. 

From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: "Tough" and "Competent". Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. 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. 

"Failure is not an option" - indeed!  "These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."  Today we honor the successful failure of Apollo 13!