Ive had post combat interviews that didnt take into account the chaos, stress and just plain old confusion that appears out of nowhere when a situation goes south. They expect us all to be robots. when X happens, you do Y. But you can never train for all the Xs that might happen.
I feel like (quite ironically, given who plays Capt. Sullenberger in this clip) the Apollo 13 mission is a perfect example of that. In hindsight there are loads of obvious failures and errors that they could've worked round before launch, but let's be honest - what astronaut or space exploration force thinks their ship is just gonna stop working less than 250k miles from Earth? They'd been to the moon twice before that, with the same hardware onboard in pretty much the same setup (minus the one faulty wire, which is both an obvious red flag and a permissible look-past), and both missions had been launched and completed in the nine months directly before the 13 launch. There was literally no reason for them to think it'd go as poorly as it did, and the post-mission inquest and damage report listed all kinds of things they "should've" done before then, but 1) they had all the intel, which wasn't something Mission Control had (and I don't think the actual crew on A13 had much of any at all), and 2) it was literally a problem that had never happened before in the history of the human race - life support failing on a rocket thousands of miles from home - what would they even be checking for and testing against, and how could they prevent it?
Ive had post combat interviews that didnt take into account the chaos, stress and just plain old confusion that appears out of nowhere when a situation goes south. They expect us all to be robots. when X happens, you do Y. But you can never train for all the Xs that might happen.
I feel like (quite ironically, given who plays Capt. Sullenberger in this clip) the Apollo 13 mission is a perfect example of that. In hindsight there are loads of obvious failures and errors that they could've worked round before launch, but let's be honest - what astronaut or space exploration force thinks their ship is just gonna stop working less than 250k miles from Earth?
They'd been to the moon twice before that, with the same hardware onboard in pretty much the same setup (minus the one faulty wire, which is both an obvious red flag and a permissible look-past), and both missions had been launched and completed in the nine months directly before the 13 launch.
There was literally no reason for them to think it'd go as poorly as it did, and the post-mission inquest and damage report listed all kinds of things they "should've" done before then, but 1) they had all the intel, which wasn't something Mission Control had (and I don't think the actual crew on A13 had much of any at all), and 2) it was literally a problem that had never happened before in the history of the human race - life support failing on a rocket thousands of miles from home - what would they even be checking for and testing against, and how could they prevent it?