Apollo 13

On April 17, 1970 the aborted Apollo 13 mission came to a conclusion as the astronauts returned safely to Earth.  It was a harrowing experience that was depicted in the movie starring Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell, the commander of the mission.  

Recently, I find myself looking at the Moon with a different focus.  With the Artemis mission my thoughts about this ever present neighbor of ours have been multiplied and indeed, magnified.

It was at the acknowledgement of the true level of the crisis being faced by the astronauts of Apollo 13 that Gene Kranz, the overall director at Mission Control in Houston, gave the above remark.  The realization was that they were not going to land on the Moon and there was a great possibility that the astronauts would not make it back home.  They were truly in problem solving crisis mode.

I think about this from watching my father tinker with or work to fix things.  Objects would be used for something they were not designed for either out of necessity or just out of convenience.  I recall that the end of screwdrivers or other tools sometimes became hammers.  Knives became screwdrivers.  Just about anything could become a measuring tool.  I still do some of that today.  When out backpacking you never know what might occur and a multitool is certainly handy, but you make do with what is available sometimes because you just don’t want to carry one more thing.  A great example is that a good solid rock becomes a hammer for tent stakes because nobody wants to add the weight of carrying a hammer.

Apollo 13 is a great example of thinking outside the box.  I too often observe students with a mindset of wanting to just get the answer.  They just want the formula.  Sometimes success isn’t measured just by the concluding result, but in the work of the journey to get there.  It isn’t always possible to follow the recipe.  Circumstances sometimes preclude doing things the prescribed way. 
 

It may not always be advised, but the engineers at NASA had a new mission, get these men home alive.  With that goal they were successful, no matter the manner in which it was done.