Agent Palmer

Around the time that the film adaptation of Lost Moon, called Apollo 13 came out, my parents who knew I was in love with all things NASA bought me the book by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.

The book, in a concerted marketing effort with the movie was also retitled from Lost Moon to Apollo 13 and with a picture of not Lovell but Tom Hanks as Lovell on the front cover. And while I read the book, or read through it when I picked it up recently, I now had the knowledge of the other books I’ve been reading.

There is much more to Gene Kranz than Ed Harris’s portrayal of the Flight Director in the movie Apollo 13. As one of the early members of Flight Control, Kranz was there for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo before moving up into more of a management role.

His book “Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond” is not only a vivid first-hand account of history as it happened, but the perspective is unique to mission control…

This is a fun little exercise if you like Guns ‘N Roses. Take their Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II albums and create a single album selecting tracks with a standard CD length cutoff on time at 74 minutes.

Now, Use Your Illusion I comes in at 16 songs with a run time of 76 minutes and Use Your Illusion II is 14 songs with a 75 minute runtime, so why 74? Well, it makes it more challenging, and it’s easy to use what was the standard.