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QOTD: Houston, We’ve Had a Problem
“OK, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
“This is Houston. Say again, please.”
“Houston, we’ve had a problem,”
These words were spoken calmly fifty years ago today, on April 13, 1970. A supposedly now routine trip to the moon — after all, we had done it twice already — became an intense race for crew survival. With only the materials on board, some way had to be found to provide enough oxygen and power to get into a safe reentry orbit with enough oxygen to keep the crew alive until they could splashdown and get out of the capsule.
The fierce level of determination, backed by true technical expertise and imagination, was reflected in a second quote that was not actually documented at the time, a short phrase that summed up the ground control teams’ ethos:
Failure is not an option.
The context was a discussion, after the fact, of the problem-solving process, in which the comment was made that they worked through all the options, but failure was not one of them. Our government agencies have been made much more risk-averse and rule-following since that time, more focussed on avoiding blame than fixing problems. Behaving otherwise gets you beaten up by Congress and the media. Yet, there are moments when the American government shows flashes of the stunning daring and competence found in the early Cold War.
Today should have been a grand celebration of disaster turned into triumph. Instead, the day is being passed by largely unremarked by public officials. That is a shame because the message of Apollo 13 could not be more relevant today. We’ve had a problem, and failure is not an option.
For further reading, see the NASA Apollo 13 Flight Journal, with photographs and diagrams.
Published in Group Writing
I didn’t even know this was the date. I do know, however, that there does seem to be an orchestrated effort to downplay our traditional American can-do spirit and try to act like the Corona virus is here permanently or something, as if we can’t do anything about it and there’s no point in trying. We have Fauci saying we must never shake hands ever again, and I swear if I hear one more person speak of this as “the new normal” or “our new reality,” I will SCREAM. Just STOP. We must not allow this to be seen as any kind of normal.
Well, its not a situation that we can pay for indefinately. As a nation, we need to get back to making things and growing things soon, or we are all going to starve.
Just about every space mission launched between april 7 – april 20. I have no idea why.The very first mission I think launched on the anniversary of Hernando Cortez discovering Florida.Maybe its storm related. But just a funny bit of useless trivia :pEdit: My information was wrong and based on a unserious perusal of NASA space missions with my son where a lot of them appeared close to his birthday. Seawriter corrected me.
I am sure someone on Ricochet has a real answer to this.
I looked it up and it seems he said something almost like that. Close enough.
Loose lips sink ships, they used to say. He has a serious case of loose lips.
Listen to pristine audio of the mission in real time here.
It might have something to do with the Pacific typhoon seasons. Northeastern Pacific has typhoons from the middle of May through November. Northwestern Pacific from late June through December.
Umm . . . no. About 4% of all manned space missions launched between those two dates because that is about 4% if the year. However, having worked on the Shuttle program between 1979 and 2011, I can guarantee they launched year round. The two most famous Apollo missions, Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 launched in December and July respectively. John Glenn’s Mercury launch was in February. The first manned Gemini launched in March. Mission 51-L (the Challenger explosion) launched in January.
Is it fair to say that the Atlantic weather patterns were especially important to launch windows and mission planning?
Absolutely never gets old:
https://youtu.be/7C3NAj4jCb0
The Ron Howard movie about Apollo 13 was a gripping account. Even though you knew there was a happy ending it had you tensed up waiting for the resolution. Masterful film making of an incredible human event.
Yes, but only because the manned launch pad is on the Atlantic coast. If Vandenberg had opened, Pacific weather patterns would have been important. But there is a fairly broad range of acceptable weather, and things like launch windows (especially for Apollo and the Shuttle missions launching interplanetary probes) and landing windows play an equally important part.
The engineering pedantic in me is having trouble letting this slip, especially since as space obsessed family living in the thick of space race (my father worked for Grumman in the 60’s and early 70’s), I recall living those years. We went to the moon for Apollo 8, 10, 11, and 12 before the Apollo 13 O2 tank failure. Missions 7 (Command Module) and 9 (Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) were in local earth orbit missions to test the various systems before the un-recallable trek to the moon.
I watched PBS News Hour last night (with Judy Woodruff) in a moment of not wanting to get off the sofa to rescue myself with the channel changer and both her guests were heavily commenting how “the world has changed forever” to the point of disgust (for me). What is wrong with people? Is it not to be desired that we even TRY to get back to what was a pretty good normal? Isn’t what people are suffering exactly the disruption of the normal? I don’t understand why this is a moment to start off in some bizarro new direction (other than to change the subject and erase our preference for what Trump had achieved). There is no logical reason to tell us our former state is now out of reach just due to this unrelated virus.
Perhaps their wishful (liberal) thinking is just a psychological preparation for Biden’s coming Bernie influence, to make the virus carry that load of unexplained socialist “inevitability” we would normally see past and resist. Or maybe they are just still stuck on their press roles being more important than they really are, and still trying to pose as being intelligent and “profound.”
I think you’re pretty close here. For most it’s not so much a conscious, articulated desire, but an unconscious way of thinking. But there are plenty of people who articulate such things, too.
The more doom and gloom they spread, the more Trump can take credit for any movement toward recovery.
This suicidal self-abuse we are in reminds me of one of those self-mutilation cults seeking penance by whipping themselves.
It’s not normal, but we will be dealing with it for some time.