The most famous line from the film Apollo 13 was never said by the real Gene Kranz. Screenwriter Bill Broyles built it from flight controller Jerry Bostic's dry description of how the team laid out options instead of panicking. This episode moves past the Hollywood myth to trace the factual biography of NASA's second chief flight director, from a farm in Toledo, Ohio overlooking the Willys-Overland Jeep plant, through the loss of his father at age seven, a high school thesis on interplanetary rockets, flying F-86 Sabre jets over the Korean DMZ, and testing surface-to-air missiles at McDonnell Aircraft.

At NASA, Kranz invented go/no-go procedures from scratch after the four-inch Mercury-Redstone flight, linking global tracking stations by teletype. The turning point came after the Apollo 1 fire killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee ...