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"Failure is not an option" is attributed to Gene Kranz, flight director of Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle missions. In the movie Apollo 13, Ed Harris says it but IMDB trivia states that it was not said during that mission. Did he really say this?

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If I remember it correctly, Gene Kranz too confirmed in an interview, that this sentence was made up for the film. But he liked it so much that he used it as the title for his memoirs / autobiography.

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The closest that quote can actually be attributed to Gene comes from an interview documented in this site.

One of their questions was "Weren't there times when everybody, or at least a few people, just panicked?" My answer was "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."

Later the crew thought about that statement, and came up with the tagline "Failure is not an option".

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