page_title: Gene Kranz
section_title: Later career
hierarchical_section_title: Gene Kranz / NASA career / Later career
caption_attribution_description: English: A photo of the vest and pin worn by Gene Kranz during the Apollo 13 mission.
context_page_description: Eugene Francis Kranz is an American aerospace engineer, a former fighter pilot, and a retired NASA Flight Director and manager. Kranz served as NASA's second Chief Flight Director, directing missions of the Gemini and Apollo programs, including the first lunar landing mission, Apollo 11. He is best known for directing the successful efforts by the Mission Control team to save the crew of Apollo 13, and was later portrayed in the major motion picture of the same name by actor Ed Harris. He is also noted for his close-cut flattop hairstyle and the dapper "mission" vests of different styles and materials made by his wife, Marta Kranz, for his Flight Director missions.
  A personal friend of the American astronauts of his time, Kranz remains a prominent and colorful figure in the history of U.S. manned space exploration; he coined the phrase "tough and competent", which became known as the "Kranz Dictum". Kranz has been the subject of movies, documentary films, and books and periodical articles. Kranz is a recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom. In a 2010 Space Foundation survey, Kranz was ranked as the #2 most popular space hero.
context_section_description: Kranz continued as a Flight Director through Apollo 17, when he worked his last shift as a flight director overseeing the mission liftoff, and then was promoted to Deputy Director of NASA Mission Operations in 1974, becoming Director in 1983. He was in Mission Control during the January 28, 1986, loss of Space Shuttle Challenger on the STS-51-L launch. He retired from NASA in 1994 after the successful STS-61 flight that repaired the optically flawed Hubble Space Telescope in 1993. In addition to having written Failure Is Not an Option, which was adapted for The History Channel in 2004, he also flies an aerobatic aircraft and serves as a flight engineer for a restored Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress.
caption: Kranz's vest and pin from the Apollo 13 mission, currently in the National Air and Space Museum
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image DateTime": "2009:09:05 22:20:35"}