Flying W Things

I finally watched Failure Is Not An Option, the History Channel special on NASA's Mission Control, last night on the TiVo.

Man.

Those were some Engineers with a capital E. I am in awe of what they did and how they did it. I cannot imagine that anything I ever do professionally will stack up to that.

I thought the show was pretty well put together. I especially enjoyed the recounting of two speeches given by Gene Kranz, one of the flight controllers for the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. (I wish I had transcribed them because I can't find the text anywhere on the internet, amazingly.) The second one, a speech he gave as the Apollo 11 Lunar Module left the Control Module to land on the moon, is right up there with Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V if you ask me. As a service to my lazy readers, I provide the ending of this famous speech here:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Indeed, I held my engineering degree cheap whilst they spake of Mission Control in the late 60's and early 70's.

There was some funny stuff too. At one point they asked the flight controllers if they had ever worn pocket protectors. All but one denied ever owning such a thing. As they made these denials, pictures of each of them with a pocket protector were shown on-screen. One guy came clean but still tried to get some lipstick on the pig - "Oh yeah, I had one of those things. But mine was leather." Nice.