roger was in our first group, ed white was in our second group, and doug grissom was in our third group. but ed white and i were in a fighter mission in germany, we went to school together and ran track together of the when he told me he was going to apply for astronaut training, i said, ed i can fly as well as you can, you know that. i'm going to apply myself for the second group. i wasn't selected, but he was. and he was, in a way, my role model, and without that tragedy, he would have been probably one of the first people on the surface of the moon. host: and a near tragedy averted by apollo 13 in that book is a photograph of you, lessons from apollo 13 where it said "failure is not an option." guest: yeah, i know that's a beautiful phrase. and once you have a mission in work, failure on that mission is not an option. that's a wonderful phrase. but if failure is not an option in anything you do, you sit on the ground, you don't do anything, you don't take risks. we have become a very risk averse society because of the high visibility of anything that might go wrong, whether it is an