Put on the spot, standing next to the Museum’s director and faced with enthusiastic applause from the audience, Kranz announced he had just been talking to a curator about donating one of the vests. At the end of the lecture, during the question-and-answer period, a Museum docent in the audience asked him when the Smithsonian Institution would get a vest. Kranz said he would loan a vest, but not donate one.

Glenn Lecture in 2005, curator Margaret Weitekamp asked Kranz about donating a vest to the national collection. Before his appearance as speaker at the John H. The story of how the vest came into the Museum’s collection is interesting. At the end, you will hear one of the team say, “Hey, Gene, I guess we can go now!” You can watch the scene from Apollo 13 where Ed Harris, playing Kranz, puts on the white vest to his team’s applause (fast-forward to 3:24). However, after Apollo 13 Kranz continued to wear his work vest. ” The splashdown vests were much flashier than the mission versions. According to his book, Failure Is Not an Option (2000), Kranz recalled, “I felt like a matador donning his suit as I put on the vest.

She told Smithsonian magazine in April 2010, “There were three Mission Control teams-red, white and blue-and Gene’s was the white team, so his vests were always white.” From that first Gemini mission onward, Marta made a white vest for every launch, plus a second celebratory vest to wear for the splashdown. Knowing Kranz’s penchant for wearing three-piece suits, his wife, Marta, a skilled seamstress, came up with the idea. Kranz started wearing a different white vest for each mission beginning with the first time he served as flight controller, Gemini IV, on June 3, 1965. Kranz’s vests represented the strong and can-do approach that pervaded his mission control team, especially during the Apollo 13 mission in which the astronauts’ lives were at stake. Kranz’s vests had legendary status around mission control, and also in the minds of the public after actor Ed Harris wore an exact replica of Kranz’s most famous vest in the 1995 movie, Apollo 13. But Kranz is also known for another thing: his white vests. Gene Kranz is best known for his stellar performance as flight director for the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission.

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