Last month while attending a conference, I had the opportunity to listen to Gene Kranz, who was a guest speaker at the conference. Gene is a retired NASA Flight Director and during the lunch session, he was recounting his story of the Apollo 13 mission. It was such a great speech that I decided to listen to his memoir “Failure is Not an Option” which tells the story from his early days of the Mercury space program through to the Apollo space program.

The amount of effort that went into the development of the space program back in the 50s and 60s was tremendous. The Mercury program was America’s first human spaceflight project. It took many great leaders, engineers, technicians and others to push the technology boundary to successfully send astronauts into orbit. In 1961, JF Kennedy proposed to the US Congress a national goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” by the end of the decade. One of Kennedy’s most famous public speeches addressing this goal was delivered in 1962 at the Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas where he said:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept …

His speech encouraged many Americans to work harder to make this dream happen. And they did make it, when on July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon aboard the Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong uttered the famous word

That's one small step for a man. One giant leap for mankind.

In the next few years after Apollo 11, America managed to send another five spaceflights to the moon. Between 1969 and 1972, there were a total of 12 men who walked on the moon.

Although there were many successful missions, there were also some “hiccups” in many missions. One of the most well-known “hiccups” was Apollo 13, which was aborted due to an explosion from an oxygen tank causing severe damage to the main Service Module. This module housed the support and life systems for the spacecraft. It took huge ingenuity from everybody involved working under extreme pressure to bring the astronauts back to the earth safely. You can imagine the intense atmosphere in the control room, the whole world was watching (literally as the media was given access to a room overlooking the control room). Everyone involved as this event unfolded worked extreme long hours to provide their support to bring their colleagues back home. This was achieved through great leadership and teamwork. Each team member knew their role and they worked together as a team and left their egos at the door, putting the team goal above everything else. This is just one example of how the space program was such a success because of the people and the teamwork.

Here are the great lessons to be learnt from the space program::

1. Having trust and belief in the team’s ability to achieve a common goal
The success of a space mission does not only depend on the crew in the spacecraft but also on the ground crew in the mission control room. The astronauts put their lives in the hands of the mission control room crew and trust them to make the right decisions and bring them back to earth safely. By building a strong relationship and trust between team members, quick decisions could be made.

2. Leaders’ ability to delegate critical work and trust team members judgement
During a mission, there were usually so many things to take care of. Flight directors needed to have the ability to delegate responsibilities. This was especially crucial during the Apollo 13 mission when everyone needed to perform under pressure. Gene selected three of his most trusted mission controllers to lead others. He trusted each of these leaders and gave them absolute authority to analyse data and to make decisions. Great leaders need to be able to delegate tasks and to encourage team members to be accountable for their actions and decisions.

3. Hire smarter and better people and work with them
Leaders should not be afraid of having smarter people in the team. Good leaders love having intelligent team members. To be a better leader, you need to surround yourself with smarter people than you are. They will help you to achieve team goals.

4. Know what you don’t know
This sounds like a simple statement but a lot of us sometimes do not want to admit that we don’t have a clue about things and pretend like we know. Failing to admit what you don’t know can lead to making wrong assumptions and decisions. In mission control, this is not acceptable, the lives of the astronauts’ were dependent on these people in mission control making the right judgments.

To finish this post I have transcribed a question that was asked at the end of Gene’s speech at the conference:

Question: About 5 – 10 years ago, there were talks about going back to the moon. They talked about taking 10 – 20 years to accomplish. What is the difference between the world in 1969, whereby we got to the moon for the first time within 8 years, and now, when we have been to the moon several times and have new technology, it will take us 10 – 20 years to do it again?

Gene’s Answer: We have the technology, we have the knowledge in space. What we are losing right now are those people capable of risk judgment. And that is the one skill it is very difficult to build to lead a team. At the same time we have people managing programs at the highest level that are working only on 3 dimensions – cost, schedule, and requirements. And they haven’t put risk into that decision because they don’t have the confidence to make risk based decisions. That’s what I think really stretches out the costs and schedules.