He directed the successful efforts by the Mission Control team to save the crew of Apollo 13, and was portrayed in the 1995 film of the same name by actor Ed Harris.

His father, Leo Peter Kranz, was the son of German immigrants, and served as an Army medic during World War I.

Kranz was interested in space at a young age; in high school he wrote a thesis on the topic of a single-stage (SSTO) rocket to the Moon.

[7] Kranz and Kraft were not the sole reason that MA-7 was saved, as that would be attributed to the whole efforts of Mission Control, but they played a major role.

He was serving as Flight Director for Apollo 11 when the Lunar Module Eagle landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969.

[4] The book by NASA, What Made Apollo a Success?, has a section about flight control written by Kranz and James Otis Covington.

[8] Kranz explains that the Mission Control logo is an interesting one; he associates it with commitment, teamwork, discipline, morale, tough, competent, risk, and sacrifice.

[9][10] Kranz's team was on duty when part of the Apollo 13 Service Module exploded and they dealt with the initial hours of the unfolding accident.

[11] His "White Team", dubbed the "Tiger Team" by the press, set the constraints for the consumption of spacecraft consumables (oxygen, electricity, and water) and controlled the three course-correction burns during the trans-Earth trajectory, as well as the power-up procedures that allowed the astronauts to land safely back on Earth in the command module.

He and his team were recommended by NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine in communications with Richard Nixon to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their roles.

In 2000, Kranz published his autobiography titled Failure Is Not An Option (ISBN 978-1-4391-4881-5), borrowing from the line used in the 1995 Apollo 13 film by actor Ed Harris.

[15] During the 2018 To the Moon and Beyond luncheon hosted by Space Center Houston, The Gene Kranz Scholarship was started, geared towards funding young students to take part in activities and training for careers in STEM.

[16] Ohio State Legislature introduced House Bill 358 to designate August 17 "Gene Kranz Day" in fall of 2019.

[20] Kranz, a Catholic, has six children with his wife, Marta: Carmen (born 1958), Lucy (1959), Joan Frances (1961), Mark (1963), Brigid (1964), and Jean Marie (1966).

He is played by Ed Harris in the 1995 film Apollo 13, who received an Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role.

[22] In the videogame Kerbal Space Program, the character for Mission Control is named "Gene Kerman", referencing Kranz and wearing a vest reminiscent of his signature apparel.

on the 2015 Public Service Broadcasting album The Race for Space, a track inspired by the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

Kranz travels all over the world giving a motivational lecture titled "Failure Is Not an Option," including the historic Apollo 13 flight control room.

In preparation for the movie, the script writers, Al Reinart and Bill Broyles, came down to Clear Lake to interview me on "What are the people in Mission Control really like?"

Though Apollo 13 did not achieve its main objective, to Kranz its astronauts' rescue is an example of the "human factor" born out of the 1960s space race.

And these teams were capable of moving right on and doing anything America asked them to do in space.According to him, a few organized examples of this factor included Grumman, who developed the Apollo Lunar Module, North American Aviation, and the Lockheed Corporation.

Another example of the "human factor" was the ingenuity and hard work by teams that developed the emergency plans and sequences as new problems arose during the Apollo 13 mission.

Kranz called a meeting of his branch and flight control team on the Monday morning following the Apollo 1 disaster that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily.

After the Space Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe quoted this speech in a discussion about what changes should be made in response to the disaster.

In his book Failure Is Not an Option, he also expressed disappointment that support for space exploration dried up after the Apollo program.

Lacking a clear goal the team that placed an American on the Moon, NASA, has become just another federal bureaucracy beset by competing agendas and unable to establish discipline within its structure.