Simon Rogerson: Failure is not an option - or is it?

Failure is not an option. This is a line from the film Apollo 13. It came from a meeting the scriptwriters had with a guy called Jerry Bostick. Jerry was the flight controller working in NASA at the time of the original Apollo 13 mission. In the meeting, one of the scriptwriters asked Jerry whether there was ever a time when people in mission control started panicking. He answered: "No. When bad things happened, we calmly laid out all the options and failure wasn't one of them." The life and death situation of a mission to space perhaps makes his reaction understandable but ‘failur...