Apollo Flight Director Gene Kranz speaking in Oshkosh

Gene Kranz didn't actually say the words "failure is not an option" uttered by the actor who portrayed him in the Tom Hanks hit movie "Apollo 13."

What the Apollo Mission Control flight director said after astronaut James Lovell told Houston there was a problem was "We've never lost an American in space and we sure aren't going to now. This crew is coming home."

Though Kranz never said the words linked to him in the movie, he did title his memoir “Failure is Not an Option.” The scriptwriters and producers convinced Kranz and the rest of the NASA team from Apollo 13 that the phrase needed to be in the script.

“They want to tell a story and do it dramatically. That’s their business. Our business is not doing things dramatically. We thought they told the story (of Apollo 13) very well,” said Kranz.

Known for his flat top brush cut and white vests, Kranz is almost as famous as Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon. The former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and NASA flight director on the first moon landing and Apollo 13 will speak in Oshkosh this week.

Kranz will be the featured speaker at the annual Wright Brothers memorial banquet at EAA AirVenture Museum on Friday. Tickets for the event are $65, which includes a reception, dinner and evening program.

One of NASA's most experienced flight officers throughout the 1960s, Kranz, 83, was in charge of mission control when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin flew the lunar lander to the moon's surface. He knew it was a momentous day, but while the rest of the planet watched on TV, Kranz and his team were very busy doing their jobs. As the lunar lander traveled around the far side of the moon and communications with Earth were cut off, Kranz quietly gathered his crew.

"I told them 'you're a great team. You'll remember this day always.' I finished by telling them two things — 'I will stand behind every decision you make and we came into the room as a team and we'll go out as a team,'" said Kranz. "Then we locked the doors of the control room. No one could come in or go out until we either landed, we crashed or we aborted."

The moon landing came very close to being aborted. What people watching on TV didn't know was that the lunar lander's fuel tank was perilously low as Armstrong and Aldrin moved the craft into position. A member of Kranz's team armed with a stop

'I'm sure you've at some time driven your car with the gas tank empty. We know we've got 120 seconds of fuel at 30% throttle. Now the room goes silent," with only the man with the stopwatch calling out the remaining time, said Kranz. "We hear 90 seconds. Then 45. Then 30. Everybody in the room is literally sucking air at this time. Once it gets to zero it's either land or abort.

"About the time he said 'fif-' there's a brief pause and then we hear Neil Armstrong say 'Houston, the eagle has landed.' It's really incredible relief. We landed with 17 seconds of fuel remaining," Kranz recalled in a phone interview last month  from his home near Houston..

By the time Apollo 13 blasted off from Cape Canaveral less than a year later, people had grown blase about the space program. The liftoff wasn't covered live, and most folks didn't tune in until the spaceship was crippled by an explosion two days into the journey to the moon. Kranz was on duty when it happened.

Before an oxygen tank exploded, blowing a hole in the side and venting the oxygen supply in the service module, Kranz and his crew had coped with a couple of minor glitches that they planned to solve when the crew went to sleep. When the astronauts reported the problem, Kranz at first thought it was simply another glitch.

"Then Lovell is looking out the window and he said 'I believe we're venting our oxygen.' All of a sudden the pieces fit together. Then we were in survival mode," said Kranz, who flew F-86 Sabres in Korea in the mid-1950s. "As a fighter pilot we would say, it was like looking into the eyes of the tiger."

Apollo 13's mission to the moon was scrapped, and in an incredible feat of engineering and ingenuity, Kranz and the rest of Mission Control figured out a way to get the three astronauts home safely.

Kranz was the mission flight director on the final moon landing, Apollo 17, when astronaut Gene Cernan was the last human to walk on the lunar surface. Kranz, who retired in the early 1990s, called it one of the toughest days in his career at NASA because he knew America's space program was giving up on the moon. He thinks humans should return to the moon to figure out how to live and thrive in space before sending people to Mars, a feat he predicts won't happen for several decades.

As for his signature white vests, which were made by his wife, Marta, before each mission, one is on display in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. It's the one he was wearing during the Apollo 13 mission.

IF YOU GO

NASA Mission Control Flight Director Gene Kranz will be the featured speaker at the Wright Brothers Memorial Banquet at EAA AirVenture.

When: 6 p.m. Dec. 9

Where: EAA AirVenture Museum, 3000 Poberezny Road, Oshkosh

Cost: $65 for general public, $55 for EAA members.

More information: eaa.org/museum, (920) 426-6108