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Why Smart People Misread Their Audiences

Veteran astronaut Joseph P. Allen told me a NASA legend that could have easily been a deleted scene from Ron Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13. In this altered version of the movie, the focus isn't on astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise as they fight for their lives after an explosion cripples their spacecraft en route to the moon, but what Mission Control's Flight Director Gene Krantz, portrayed by actor Ed Harris in the film, is doing back in Houston. Described to me as “an engineer's engineer” by Allen, Krantz wasn't what you'd call media astute. A highly capable engineer, he lacked the ability ...

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