Reminds me of a quote from “The Martian” book “Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.”
It's been 15 years since I saw this movie and I still remember that quote: "We gotta find a way to make _this_ fit into the hole for _this_ using nothing but _that_ ."
And they did it, not only did they do it, they did it incredibly quickly. The majority of guys helping run things in the basement of Houston were still engineers at the time, mechanical engineers...what better group of people to work on a problem like that.
Absolutely, mate. They knew lives were on the line. This wasn't a task handed down to them to meet some arbitrarily deadline, or line someone else's pockets. Stakes were way too important to waste time complaining.
It's a fantastic scene...sadly (?), it's a dramatization. In reality it was just one engineer, and he solved the problem in his head in his car on the way to NASA. Still, that's why you put _based_ on a true story in these things. The precise moment-to-moment details aren't terribly important; this scene here was shot showing a team to emphasize how much getting the crew of Apollo 13 back home was a group effort from basically everyone in NASA.
@@RogueShadows That figures, this is the kind of thing anyone handy can figure out pretty quickly once they know what's available to do it with. Thank goodness for the duct tape though. Even by itself that would've done the job.
@@AndSendMe Like I said, reality in films like this reality can afford to take a back seat in order to emphasize a larger point that you might not otherwise have time to show. Plus, that engineer I mentioned really _was_ called a steely-eyed missile man, i.e., the highest compliment you can get in NASA, for solving the problem.
There is a line in this movie that truly sums up the experience of Apollo 13 perfectly: “I don’t care what it was DESIGNED to do - I just want to know what it CAN DO.” As impressive a feat as a moon landing is, I am much more impressed by this “successful failure”. Truly NASA’s finest hour.
In the field of space travel, traveling from one planet/moon to another is ridiculously hard. Surviving and making it back when something goes wrong halfway there? If we ever do contact highly advanced alien beings, that will be a story even THEY are impressed by.
@@Agent1W - "Might" ...... they "Will". Having studied lot of ancient history there is enough of outer beings (aliens) who are very very advanced. If you are young enough, you might these come true in your life time.
Legos weren't popular yet when these engineers were growing up. I grew up in the 50s and 60s and I never even heard of them. Erector Sets were our thing.
@ActionGenesis The government is hampered by way too much beauracracy, congresscritters looking for pork for their districts, etc. Blue Origin, SpaceX, that's where it's going to come from. And it's going to be in the next few years.
Like he said, 'Tell me this isn't a Govt operation' yes it is, spending more than is needed but the best engineers are in the private sector and that is what saved the men on Apollo 13, not Govt Bureaucrats.
@ActionGenesis F35 cost 1 trillion dollars, who knows what kind of black projects are funded with that budget. Maybe they're already into space exploration.
@ActionGenesis Nothing public anyway. I'd be excited to see another global turbulence generator like the nuclear arms race. There has been a lot of funding and public projects centered around ESP this past decade so we've probably already mastered that in private. Can't wait for research on dreams and their potential for avoiding the flow of real time.
Or a Boeing shareholder driven one (I give you 737 MAX). The expression good enough for government work originated as a statement of highest quality until it was hijacked by cynics.
It's less a matter of it being a government project, and more of it being a project with very tight deadlines being subcontracted out to several different designers and manufacturers. If you want to go to the moon in 8 years it's a smart approach, but it's going to be more expensive, and you pretty much guarantee that there will be no part commonality.
@@rcpmac - nasa has had 6 missions to the moon. Boeing is responsible for producing airplanes that fly probably over 1 million people from around the world, every single day... Boeing also generates a profit, nasa and government organizations typically operate massively in the red. Government is much worse at delivering than the free market. You say the post office, i say amazon 24 hour delivery.
I like this scene because there's no anger, no disdain, no disrespect, and no bullshit. the assignment is ridiculous and they know it is, so they gotta just get to work
I figure that was one of those lines so the audience could know why they’re doing this. In most situations, these guys would know what they were building without announcement.
@@kaykay4014 Agreed. O'brien: Worf, these are engineers, they don't do well with orders, but give them a problem and they will come thru every time, with a little encouragement. DS9
The engineers were really put to the test with so many work arounds and just solving problems that they'd never had considered. Truly mission control was in its finest hour.
It's just a movie, made to be exciting. In reality the LEM lifeboat was a contingency NASA had planned for, the filter fix already tested long before Apollo 13 took off, the LEM battery to help the CM turn back on was also tested before flight.
@@evanjohnson1299 Maybe so, Evan. But it was its own sort of "cave" and there was no lack of scraps around there. Heck, let Stark loose in NASA's vehicle assembly building at Cape Canaveral and he'd probably be well on his way to Alpha Centauri inside of a week.
^ Different companies designing different vehicles, most importantly under a tight time-frame. This was likely a scenario that was not thought of in the time they would have had to test everything - it is an extremely unusual situation.
@@RazordraacGaming In fact the first Apollo to go out to the Moon (Apollo 8) didn't even have the LEM (which is what they called it at that time, later the shortened the abbreviation to LM), since it wasn't ready yet!!! Just imagine if the LOX tank explosion had happened on Apollo 8, they would have died.....
This is a really special movie and Ed Harris’ performance is truly moving, particularly the lines he delivers.This has to be without a doubt one of the most inspirational movies ever made.
This moment was NASA's finest hour. Not landing on the moon, or helping break the sound barrier. This moment here. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of what these guys did to bring the crew home. Hopefully we remember these lessons when we go back to the moon and beyond.
Except you won't be responsible for designing and manufacturing the same part in the other module. That's another team kept entirely separate from yours.
I can't remember where, but I feel like I read somewhere that exactly that happened. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy is now the rule on our spacecraft.
I had a brief stint as an airline mechanic. Lines for high pressure N2, low pressure N2, and O2 are vastly different to avoid using the wrong one, which can be lethal.
As a tech who has had to do everything with nothing, this was my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies. "We got to make this, fit into a hole for THIS, using nothing but THAT" Those guys are my heroes.
I grew up farming and now I'm a trucker. I have it play through my head every time something bad happens. I am the absolute king of the scabbed together field fix. My favorite was when I fixed a broken air line with a latex glove, bailing wire, some wierd roll pin thing I found in the glove box, and electrical tape. I don't know if I should be proud or ashamed of my talents.
To Mr. Waitt and others, I offer these 2, lesser known Murphy's Laws: "If necessity is the Mother Of Invention, then Sheer Desperation Must Surely Be The FATHER!" > And < "If it is Stupid but it works, then it ain't Stupid!"
In case you didn’t know, the lead engineer was Ed Smylie. Don’t forget that not only did his team figure out how to do it, they had to write up the procedures in a way that the CAPCOM could relay up to the flight crew so they could build it. When the crew sent a picture of the completed filter, it looked exactly how Smylie’s team designed it. However, it was not as dramatic as shown in the movie because they actually started looking at this contingency shortly after the Apollo 9 flight.
I read somewhere that this was not how it actually went down. The problem was real, but the solution was devised by only one engineer, who came up with the solution in his head while he was driving to Mission Control. Less dramatic, but it shows just how smart these guys are.
@@claytonwade3570 apparently it was a "we know that we could do bag-hose-filter if we need to" before, and 13 turned it into "actually designing it step by step". And then after this they actually turned it into an official procedure so they could do it again if need be.
@@pavarottiaardvark3431 I doubt that. If they had considered it why not just use the same filter on both the LEM and CM in the first place? The obvious solution would have been interopability in the first place. The reality is Grumman made the LEM and NA Aviation made the CM and I strongly doubt Grumman on Long Island and NAA in Cali did a lot of communicating.
There are some movies that are legendary for helping job recruitment into certain fields. Just as Raiders of the Lost Ark inspired hundreds of current archaeologists and historians, this film (and specifically, scenes like this one) helped create an entirely new generation of engineers.
It was a nice try on the film's part, but it never got me past Calculus I in college. Not that I have anyone to truly blame but myself. But engineers are a dime a dozen anyway without my addition.
"Well I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole, rapidly !!" In other words, I don't know what you guys are going to do, just fix the problem.
classic leadership. OK, thanks for telling me the problem. You are the experts, find the solution, and get it done. No grand standing, no leadership BS. Just get it done guys. His full support is implied and does not need to be stated.
It's embarrassing how many low level managers thing this stuff is examples of good leadership. As the script goes it's not. What you don't see is the large effort over a long time to make the environment where things like can be said and expect them to work.
For those wondering: Things like this are common. Remember two different companies were responsible for the two spacecraft. North American Aviation was the contractor for the Command/Service Modules, and Grumman was the contractor for the Lunar Module. Each contractor independently selected it's suppliers, leading to the situation where each spacecraft had its own, incompatible filtration systems. Also remember the LM was heavily weight restricted, hence why it didn't carry more cartridges then was strictly necessary. Finally, I read some of the post-flight investigations, and it was found that the suit hoses could have been used to directly connect the CM cartridges if necessary. This wasn't attempted as it was believed there would be too much resistance in the loop for that to work.
Apparently, the two companies also had a a bit of a friendly rivalry: in real life, a Grumman engineer forwarded to North American Aviation, the builders of the Command and Service Module, a "towing invoice" including charges for mileage and "extra person in room" (obviously, in a normal mission, Swigert would not have been in the LEM). North American Rockwell had a similar sense of humor about and reminded Grumman that the CSM had "ferried" the Lunar Module to the Moon previously without payment, and it would be a good idea to just call it even.
: The funny thing is that it seems the real story of how they got the square and circle to fit is less dramatic. Apparently in the morning they called the engineer who designed (or perhaps helped design) that system, and he figured it out in his head on the drive to work, at which point he called them and told them the process step-by-step. It's still my favorite scene, alongside the Grandma Lovell assuring her granddaughters that if they could get a washing machine to fly, her Jimmy could land it.
0:23 - 0:27 ""**facepalm** Tell me this isn't a government operation" Haha, that's probably how I'd react, jeez, seems like a stupid thing to overlook.
Different contractors working on different parts. But they were right, there was just no reason to ever think they might need to interchange the scrubbers between the modules.
It wasn't "a stupid thing to overlook"-it was that they were designed for a different contingency. The receptacles in the LM were also designed to take the canisters from the PLSS backpacks (which they did do on 13). It would have taken considerable re-engineering to change the CM to use the LM and PLSS canisters, and a considerable redesign to get the LM and PLSS to take the CM canister. And while it was thought that there might be a situation where they had to use the PLSS canisters in the LM to buy them time (like a bad PDI burn that puts them in a crappy orbit and the CSM has to come get them), the working assumption was that any event severe enough to completely knock out the SM was going to kill the crew anyway.
When it comes to working / traveling in space, IMO at least, it seems like there are very few contingencies that should be overlooked since they deal directly with the lives of the astronauts on board.
Again, they planned for the contingency that was thought to be far more likely-the need to use the PLSS canisters in the LM. But not all things can be planned for. Do you push the program back a year to extensively redesign either the CM or the LM and PLSS to allow planning for an event that's almost certain to kill the crew outright? Finally, remember that the only reason this came up was because the explosion happened in a very narrow window of time that made a rescue possible. Had it happened a couple of hours earlier, the LM would have run out of electrical power. A few hours later, and the descent engine can't give them enough delta V to get back on a free return trajectory and they don't come home
One of my favoritemovie quotes, that I never hear anyone ever talk about. "We gotta find a way to make THIS fit into the hole for THIS....using nothing but THAT!
I have always thought that this scene is a great way to introduce young people to the world of engineering. One must solve a problem and do it with limited materials and time.
I think even if the guys didnt make it back, Gene Kranz still would have went down as history as a man that did literally everything he could to save their lives
Even though they Failed the mission, the success of bringing these guys back and lack of imagination has probably saved billions, if not trillions of dollars and someone’s life by now creating a standardised system and triple redundancy everywhere. Same plugs, cables, slots, battery connectors, everything. This was the best case of the worst thing to happen in space, for any nation.
I'm old enough (barely !) to remember when the incident happened for real in the early 1970's I guess. I remember as we followed the news at the time (one single channel, of Black and White TV here) that there was a very real danger that they wouldn't be able to get the astronauts back alive. And I tell you, even us folks in other countries on the other side of the world, were cheering, when we heard they got them all back alive. It was idiocy to have non-standard parts. They learnt their lesson that time. Yep, anything that's "mission critical" should have triple redundancy, wherever possible.This movie helps to make the real life incident clearer for people nowadays.
Jim Lovell: "This was a little bit of an engineering goof right here. Square canisters for the CM and round canisters for LEM. No one would ever have thought we had to transfer canisters."
Standardized parts. Its not the first time it happened. In tank building Americans pioneered part standardization using the same (or very similar) suspension bogies and running gear components across all Shermans, the M3 Lee/Grant and even the older M2 Medium Tank, as well as going to great lengths to share as many automotive components and spare parts as possible. In Germany you could be lucky if one Tiger Is roadwheel fit on another Tiger, because both major subvariants had entirely different roadwheels. One-size-fits-all and precision engineering just dont go well together.
That sigh is near perfect, it's the sound of complete disbelief and dejection rolled into one and I've yet to see another scene from a movie that captures this emotion so well.
That line is my favorite from this movie and I’ve used it often to describe insane tasks that have been asked of me and others. I also love the P.S. to that order....”Rapidly”.
One thing I loved about this film was the number of character actors you had playing parts in Mission Control. Clint Howard, Chris Ellis, Marc McClure, Jim Meskimen, the list goes on...
The neat thing about this is NASA already had this figured out beforehand. They just had pull out the cookbook and read the recipe to them over the radio.
If someone were to tell me to fit a large cube into a small cylinder, using nothing but some trash, the first word that comes out of my mouth would have been "impossible." Assuming I can't just break down the cube into pieces. That's why I'm not qualified to work in NASA.
As an engineer it’s hard not to love this movie. Probably the only movie I can think of where guys who understand math, science and how to build things get to be heroes instead of the guys who know how to fight and kill.
You remember in Kindergarten there was that weird kid in your class that just couldn’t understand shapes? You would see him trying to push a rectangle block through a circle. He’s just not getting it. If that kid grew up and saw this, you would see a giant crowd part ways leading up to him slowly getting up from a chair. He just looking at this and says “I’ve lived my whole life for this moment...” 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂I’m dying...
Making THIS fit into the hole for THIS was not the amazing part…. It was the “using nothing but THAT” that really showed the genius of the people that worked on that project. The limitations were enormous and they were overcome.
Absolutely, the LEM lifeboat was a tested idea and square filter fix already tested. The LEM battery to help restart the CM was another tested contingency.
What I like about this is that no one nags, looks for a scapegoat or says anything about it being impossible. They just recognise the situation and get to work to resolve it.
they called the device they came up with "the mailbox". It was mostly made of plastic and duct tape. Joseph Kerwin dictated the design of the mailbox to Swigert and Haise over the radio. It took them about an hour to complete it, and when they did the CO2 levels started dropping immediately.
Girls doing a project: “OMG, we finished so early! Lets take this extra time to make it as cute and pretty as possible!” Boys, the night before it’s due: 0:38
Eric Portillo In many cases, they did! Margaret Heafield Hamilton, who is actually still alive today, is a software engineer responsible for avoiding an abort of the Apollo 11 landing. That’s not to mention the hundreds of fe,ale calculators that were kept from rising through the ranks in NASA simply because of their gender. Makes you wonder just how much faster we could have gotten to the moon had the barriers of racism and sexism keeping the best and the brightest out of NASA were never there.
My Mom always got mad at me for procrastinating and waiting till the night before it's due to start a project for school. These guys had 15 minutes. I was giving myself plenty of time!
"We need to find a way to make (square filter) fit in the hole for (round filter) using nothing but (junk on the table)" - my engineering heart fluttered.
Going forward, they should probably issue 3D printers as standard equipment on space missions. "We need to replace X part and all the other ones are broke? We'll just make another one!"
They've gone one better. NASA has equipped the ISS with the Refabricator, which replaced the regular 3D printer that's been in service since 2014. Part of it is a 3D printer. The other part is a plastic recycling system. They can throw broken 3D parts, packaging materials or whatever else they've got up there (and the nice thing about a controlled environment like space flight is the people running it can demand only certain plastics be used) in the top of the machine, and get parts they need at the bottom. Very slick system.
It's less dramatic when you include the fact that they had done it before the Apollo 13 even flew, so when it came to it it was only a matter of looking at the notes.
Notice, no groans or anything else besides a slight grimace and a slight nod of the head! We just got handed a tough job and lives depend on it, so it is going to get done!!!
Again, this shows the genius of not only Ron Howard as a director but the flight crew in general. 1,000 things could have gone wrong on this mission and yet with their ingenuity they were able to get the crew home.
could you even imagine the pressure of being in that room, and trying to find a way to save the astronauts lives? plus the media? and the american public? and that's just on the ground.... imagine how the actual astronauts felt!
I'm just rather surprised that in a movie of this caliber that the actors at mission control are calling Gene Kranz by his first name. From what I've read, nobody would dare call him "Gene". He was referred to as "Flight" (radio call sign) or Mr Kranz. That's it.
“Only best engineers and scientists are working on a solution to this problem” The scientists and engineers; ok this solution is going to involve a lot of duct tape
"This just isn't a contingency we've remotely looked at." A phrase we will unfortunately hear many times during the wide spread use of of self-driving cars, trucks, ships and aircraft.
Except it was. This wasn't a line from the transcripts - because in reality, it most certainly was a contingency they looked as - as the procedure to construct an adapter was already developed long before Apollo 11 even flew; much less Apollo 13.
One minor inaccuracy is when the engineer said "This isn't a contingency we've even remotely looked at" While no procedure existed (And that's what the men in the scene then worked on) a possibility of having to use the CM modules in the LM had been looked at. So it as a minor matter to come up with a way to get them adapted. But the concept of having to use the lithium hydroxide canisters from the CM in the LM had in fact been studied before.
Originally called the White Team, it was an early idea of NASA for dealing with problems with the technology or systems. They are a group of diverse experts that work well with one another in order to solve a difficult conflict regardless of how little time and how high the stakes. Nowadays tiger teams are practically everywhere.
Sadly as much a great film this was, theres some glaring "liberties" taken. The 2 contractors who built the LM and the CM has different designs and thus different filters which as they carried plenty for the mission, it wasnt remotely thought that they would need to interchange. In the Movie, it is portrayed that the men suddenly had to design & build the "letterbox" filter BUT it had already been designed around Apollo 8 by the engineers and they simply sent the instructions up to the men to build it with what they had. This info comes from footage from the engineers talking about the designs and how they simulated and thought of every possible situation except the explosion of both oxygen tanks which they reasoned would have destroyed the craft anyway so they had no contingency for that. However one tank exploded and crippled all the plumbing to the other tank and all the redundant valves ect making it a perfect? design was now unusable and the 2nd tank just leaked out. The later SM's had a extra oxygen tank on the other side of the SM and only one tank is needed anyway for the approx 10 days trip but they installed 2 next to each other just as a backup. Also the reentry part of the trip, the guidance guys claiming that the trajectory was shallowing out - coming in not steep enough into atmosphere. The claim is its caused by lack of moon rocks- i doubt if the smart guys would have overlooked the lighter craft in their numbers, the fact is they never knew why they shallowed but it may have been continue venting from whatever was ruptured very slowly giving minute thrust over time up to reentry. That added a very long reentry phase of over 4 minutes but finally the voice came from the CM that all was well and the chutes opened. Basically the film tries to portray the very personal work of just 1 guy working on reentry power spikes for powering up the CM from the LM batteries backflowing on the ground simulator. Fact is ALL the engineers from all the companies were in the simulators night and day both at NASA and at the headquarters in their own sims , working on solutions, so theres no I in team at NASA, it is a group effort totally. Astronaut Scott and others? helped in making the film and i believe there was disagreement on the authenticity? ect of the facts and all that. So this was a film not a documentary and with great performances by the actors and brilliant fiim making and CGI but is what it is...
@Rb Hal They had a book they developed with contingency plans for any possible SNAFU they could think of in the time available. Some problems they knew there would have no realistic solution. The movie did have a lot of bullshit in it tho as is usual with movies. For example the astronauts getting all emotional like... well actors do. That never happened. I consider that disrespectful portraying astronauts as if they are arts and entertainment people.
As soon as I saw the roll of duck tape when he dumped the box I knew they would have no problem getting it to work.
Reminds me of a quote from “The Martian” book
“Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.”
Handyman's secret weapon.
NASA famously said "If you have a billion dollar project without tape, plastic and cardboard, you're lost"
@@joshuasantana685 The only thing Nasa couldn't make better by throwing money at it. :)
@@BoeseFlueche The Russians gave their astronauts a pencil, the NASA invented the ballpoint-pen! :)
When you and the boys have 15 minutes to complete a group project yall haven't started.
Wait a minute, the left brainwashed me to believe black females were the brains behind NASA
@LabCat don't even bother. This guy doesn't care about being right he cares about getting people mad and then playing victim
For what it’s worth, in reality, they were working on the cardboard gimmick for days before actually using it.
@@ryanjones9498 RIP Katherine Johnson
One time I made a presentation on my laptop in class while other people were presenting.
It's been 15 years since I saw this movie and I still remember that quote: "We gotta find a way to make _this_ fit into the hole for _this_ using nothing but _that_ ."
And they did it, not only did they do it, they did it incredibly quickly. The majority of guys helping run things in the basement of Houston were still engineers at the time, mechanical engineers...what better group of people to work on a problem like that.
the Sententious Vaunter
Same here.
Fyi it was just one guy who build the thingy ;P this is just a lill buff
the Sententious Vaunter my gruncle said that
That’s what she said
One of my favorite scenes in any movie ever. The engineering team doesn't even hesitate. No complaints, no whining, no arguing. And they did it!
Absolutely, mate. They knew lives were on the line. This wasn't a task handed down to them to meet some arbitrarily deadline, or line someone else's pockets. Stakes were way too important to waste time complaining.
It's a fantastic scene...sadly (?), it's a dramatization. In reality it was just one engineer, and he solved the problem in his head in his car on the way to NASA.
Still, that's why you put _based_ on a true story in these things. The precise moment-to-moment details aren't terribly important; this scene here was shot showing a team to emphasize how much getting the crew of Apollo 13 back home was a group effort from basically everyone in NASA.
@@RogueShadows That figures, this is the kind of thing anyone handy can figure out pretty quickly once they know what's available to do it with. Thank goodness for the duct tape though. Even by itself that would've done the job.
@@AndSendMe Like I said, reality in films like this reality can afford to take a back seat in order to emphasize a larger point that you might not otherwise have time to show.
Plus, that engineer I mentioned really _was_ called a steely-eyed missile man, i.e., the highest compliment you can get in NASA, for solving the problem.
honestly, other than the solution being attached to human lives, this was likely a fun problem to tackle compared to their normal day to day tasks.
There is a line in this movie that truly sums up the experience of Apollo 13 perfectly:
“I don’t care what it was DESIGNED to do - I just want to know what it CAN DO.”
As impressive a feat as a moon landing is, I am much more impressed by this “successful failure”. Truly NASA’s finest hour.
In the field of space travel, traveling from one planet/moon to another is ridiculously hard. Surviving and making it back when something goes wrong halfway there? If we ever do contact highly advanced alien beings, that will be a story even THEY are impressed by.
That is honestly the most impelling quote of the whole movie for me. How can anyone miss that romantic charm?
@@VivaLaDnDLogs I don't know. They might still belittle us and call us "noobs".
task failed sucsessfuly
@@Agent1W - "Might" ...... they "Will". Having studied lot of ancient history there is enough of outer beings (aliens) who are very very advanced. If you are young enough, you might these come true in your life time.
1:02 “Better get some coffee going.” The real and overlooked reason those astronauts made it back home...
Juan Valdez is the true hero.
And whoever got that coffee going is the real MVP of the entire Apollo 13 mission.
First thing you do when you have to solve a problem: Brew a REAL strong pot of coffee. You're gonna need it.
Coffee is fuel for engineers and programmers. They can't work without it.
@@katherineberger6329 and we mean enough grounds to the point of overflowing
Team member who have been playing with LEGOs : "I've waited my whole life for this"
Marian Paździoch i’m about to end this carbon dioxide’s whole career
@@C3R341K1LL3R All the CO_2_ molecules in CSM have surprised Pikachu faces.
Legos weren't popular yet when these engineers were growing up. I grew up in the 50s and 60s and I never even heard of them. Erector Sets were our thing.
@@EtzEchad Don't forget Lincoln Log sets 🤣
I guess I was fortunate enough to have grown up with all of them.
The US showed their real capacity not by going to the moon, but by being able to bring those guys back alive.
@ActionGenesis The government is hampered by way too much beauracracy, congresscritters looking for pork for their districts, etc. Blue Origin, SpaceX, that's where it's going to come from. And it's going to be in the next few years.
@ActionGenesis theyd rather spend 650 billion on an army that has zero rivals than advance human kind
Like he said, 'Tell me this isn't a Govt operation' yes it is, spending more than is needed but the best engineers are in the private sector and that is what saved the men on Apollo 13, not Govt Bureaucrats.
@ActionGenesis F35 cost 1 trillion dollars, who knows what kind of black projects are funded with that budget. Maybe they're already into space exploration.
@ActionGenesis Nothing public anyway. I'd be excited to see another global turbulence generator like the nuclear arms race. There has been a lot of funding and public projects centered around ESP this past decade so we've probably already mastered that in private. Can't wait for research on dreams and their potential for avoiding the flow of real time.
“Tell me this isn’t a government operation.” The accuracy of that statement...
Or a Boeing shareholder driven one (I give you 737 MAX). The expression good enough for government work originated as a statement of highest quality until it was hijacked by cynics.
No anger, just complete and utter resignation and disgust XD
It's less a matter of it being a government project, and more of it being a project with very tight deadlines being subcontracted out to several different designers and manufacturers. If you want to go to the moon in 8 years it's a smart approach, but it's going to be more expensive, and you pretty much guarantee that there will be no part commonality.
@@rcpmac - nasa has had 6 missions to the moon.
Boeing is responsible for producing airplanes that fly probably over 1 million people from around the world, every single day...
Boeing also generates a profit, nasa and government organizations typically operate massively in the red. Government is much worse at delivering than the free market. You say the post office, i say amazon 24 hour delivery.
@@billbillson5082
But as of late Boeing has had massive quality control issues, especially with software, both for its aircraft and SLS.
I like this scene because there's no anger, no disdain, no disrespect, and no bullshit. the assignment is ridiculous and they know it is, so they gotta just get to work
Nowadays movies always seem to have at least one person bitching and moaning in every scene, it is nice to see the maturity on display here.
@@slayerhuh404 Well nowadays there's a woman in every scene...
@@Laneous14 lol or a sooyyyyboyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
@@Laneous14And the one bitching and moaning is the man 😂
That was how it was for real, except they were a lot calmer.
The guy that says "Let's build a filter" is eaisly the most inspiring person to me.
I am imagining the guy who said it already had the first few steps of design/mods in mind already...
"Better get some coffee going"
@@windwalker5765 "Better get some coffee going" - this guy was the true inspiration
@@andfaulkner in sports he'd be called the glue guy. Not the flashiest, nor the most talented, but elevates the entire team regardless lol
I figure that was one of those lines so the audience could know why they’re doing this.
In most situations, these guys would know what they were building without announcement.
Team work and human creativity at it's finest.
"Tell a man exactly what needs to be done, and let him surprise you with his ingenuity."
General George S. Patton
@@kaykay4014 Agreed.
O'brien: Worf, these are engineers, they don't do well with orders, but give them a problem and they will come thru every time, with a little encouragement.
DS9
Isaac Allerton Encouragement being black coffee?
@@smoketinytom Good job men.
And no women
The engineers were really put to the test with so many work arounds and just solving problems that they'd never had considered. Truly mission control was in its finest hour.
It's just a movie, made to be exciting.
In reality the LEM lifeboat was a contingency NASA had planned for, the filter fix already tested long before Apollo 13 took off, the LEM battery to help the CM turn back on was also tested before flight.
geez, there is a full roll of duct tape there. they could probably make 2 adapters, a new heatshield and a spare lunar module out of this
If Tony Stark had been on that team, he'd have probably built an entire new spacecraft out of those scraps. LOL
@@crucisnh IDK about that he isn't in a cave, he just has a box of scraps.
@@evanjohnson1299 Maybe so, Evan. But it was its own sort of "cave" and there was no lack of scraps around there.
Heck, let Stark loose in NASA's vehicle assembly building at Cape Canaveral and he'd probably be well on his way to Alpha Centauri inside of a week.
@@crucisnh and bring them back on the moon, with batteries to spare.
Duct tape: Never leave home without it.
What a great example of teamwork. This film illustrates that all along the storyline....
I seen other astronauts in other missions play with this stuff in later Apollo flights.
So glad they made it home safely.
^ Different companies designing different vehicles, most importantly under a tight time-frame. This was likely a scenario that was not thought of in the time they would have had to test everything - it is an extremely unusual situation.
@@RazordraacGaming In fact the first Apollo to go out to the Moon (Apollo 8) didn't even have the LEM (which is what they called it at that time, later the shortened the abbreviation to LM), since it wasn't ready yet!!!
Just imagine if the LOX tank explosion had happened on Apollo 8, they would have died.....
@@timengineman2nd714 The worst part is that Lovell was on Apollo 8 and 13
This is a really special movie and Ed Harris’ performance is truly moving, particularly the lines he delivers.This has to be without a doubt one of the most inspirational movies ever made.
Whenever something goes wrong, I still use his best line to this day:
"FAILURE is NOT an OPTION!"
I had the honor of meeting Gene Kranz at a book signing and remotely watched one of his lectures. Truly the best PM I’ve ever known.
This moment was NASA's finest hour. Not landing on the moon, or helping break the sound barrier. This moment here. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of what these guys did to bring the crew home. Hopefully we remember these lessons when we go back to the moon and beyond.
Note to future self: if the design includes a part with the same function in two locations, keep them the same shape.
Except you won't be responsible for designing and manufacturing the same part in the other module. That's another team kept entirely separate from yours.
@@mediapark101 I bet there was an interdepartmental memo about those filters after this mission was over with... 😉
I can't remember where, but I feel like I read somewhere that exactly that happened. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy is now the rule on our spacecraft.
I had a brief stint as an airline mechanic. Lines for high pressure N2, low pressure N2, and O2 are vastly different to avoid using the wrong one, which can be lethal.
@@arianebolt1575 Right, but if the two CO2 scrubbers do the exact same job, they should be standardized.
I remember watching this film in a filled MIT lecture hall, and holy cow, did the audience cheer at this scene!
[LSC...]
@Han Kim Yeah, way smarter than you.
@@popkorn256 yet nerds
Okay Spilner.
Did they cheer at the science or the coffee?
That casual flex though.
As a tech who has had to do everything with nothing, this was my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies. "We got to make this, fit into a hole for THIS, using nothing but THAT"
Those guys are my heroes.
Obadiah Stane: Tony Stark built it in a cave out of a box of scrap! = mini arc reactor.
Scientist: But I'm not Tony Stark.
Iron Man 1
I grew up farming and now I'm a trucker. I have it play through my head every time something bad happens.
I am the absolute king of the scabbed together field fix. My favorite was when I fixed a broken air line with a latex glove, bailing wire, some wierd roll pin thing I found in the glove box, and electrical tape.
I don't know if I should be proud or ashamed of my talents.
@@rwaitt14153 I can tell you, it's beats NOT being able to do that.
To Mr. Waitt and others, I offer these 2, lesser known Murphy's Laws:
"If necessity is the Mother Of Invention, then Sheer Desperation Must Surely Be The FATHER!"
> And <
"If it is Stupid but it works, then it ain't Stupid!"
In case you didn’t know, the lead engineer was Ed Smylie. Don’t forget that not only did his team figure out how to do it, they had to write up the procedures in a way that the CAPCOM could relay up to the flight crew so they could build it. When the crew sent a picture of the completed filter, it looked exactly how Smylie’s team designed it.
However, it was not as dramatic as shown in the movie because they actually started looking at this contingency shortly after the Apollo 9 flight.
I read somewhere that this was not how it actually went down. The problem was real, but the solution was devised by only one engineer, who came up with the solution in his head while he was driving to Mission Control. Less dramatic, but it shows just how smart these guys are.
i'm shocked it wasn't a contingency before tbh
@@claytonwade3570 apparently it was a "we know that we could do bag-hose-filter if we need to" before, and 13 turned it into "actually designing it step by step". And then after this they actually turned it into an official procedure so they could do it again if need be.
@@pavarottiaardvark3431 I doubt that. If they had considered it why not just use the same filter on both the LEM and CM in the first place? The obvious solution would have been interopability in the first place. The reality is Grumman made the LEM and NA Aviation made the CM and I strongly doubt Grumman on Long Island and NAA in Cali did a lot of communicating.
@@KenS1267 if you doubt it take it up with Gene Kranz's memoir.
@@pavarottiaardvark3431 Got a page number? I just flipped through it and didn't find any such claim.
The time gap between today (2020) and when AP13 came out (1995) is the same as the gap to when AP13 actually happened(1970)!
I can't even imagine how crazy hard it must been to just invent that using only those materials.
in a massively short time limit.
Necessity is the mother of invention. That, and duct tape can do anything.
Remember, duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.
+MythosGreer I understood that reference
aaand instruct astronauts on a trajectory to the moon how to build it themselves
There are some movies that are legendary for helping job recruitment into certain fields. Just as Raiders of the Lost Ark inspired hundreds of current archaeologists and historians, this film (and specifically, scenes like this one) helped create an entirely new generation of engineers.
It was a nice try on the film's part, but it never got me past Calculus I in college. Not that I have anyone to truly blame but myself. But engineers are a dime a dozen anyway without my addition.
Dead Poet Society for Teachers.....
Top Gun.
@@Agent1W engineers? Sure but good engineers? They're hard to come by. You should give it another shot if you can
It did for me
Ain’t nothing a little ingenuity and a pot of black coffee can’t fix.
Doubting Thomas and duct tape
davyt0247 If something cant be fixed with duct tape, it deserves to stay broken.
lol
lighter coffee has more caffeine
"Tell a man exactly what needs to be done, and let him surprise you with his ingenuity."
General George S. Patton
"Well I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole, rapidly !!"
In other words, I don't know what you guys are going to do, just fix the problem.
In Gene's words: work the problem
classic leadership. OK, thanks for telling me the problem. You are the experts, find the solution, and get it done. No grand standing, no leadership BS. Just get it done guys. His full support is implied and does not need to be stated.
He KNEW what the guys were going to do (the End Result) but Not HOW they were going to do it!!!
It's embarrassing how many low level managers thing this stuff is examples of good leadership. As the script goes it's not. What you don't see is the large effort over a long time to make the environment where things like can be said and expect them to work.
I really like this scene because I think it perfectly shows the essence of what it means to be an engineer.
Whenever I speak with someone about "The Martian", I say that the whole movie is like this scene, for an hour and a half.
For those wondering: Things like this are common. Remember two different companies were responsible for the two spacecraft. North American Aviation was the contractor for the Command/Service Modules, and Grumman was the contractor for the Lunar Module. Each contractor independently selected it's suppliers, leading to the situation where each spacecraft had its own, incompatible filtration systems.
Also remember the LM was heavily weight restricted, hence why it didn't carry more cartridges then was strictly necessary.
Finally, I read some of the post-flight investigations, and it was found that the suit hoses could have been used to directly connect the CM cartridges if necessary. This wasn't attempted as it was believed there would be too much resistance in the loop for that to work.
Apparently, the two companies also had a a bit of a friendly rivalry: in real life, a Grumman engineer forwarded to North American Aviation, the builders of the Command and Service Module, a "towing invoice" including charges for mileage and "extra person in room" (obviously, in a normal mission, Swigert would not have been in the LEM). North American Rockwell had a similar sense of humor about and reminded Grumman that the CSM had "ferried" the Lunar Module to the Moon previously without payment, and it would be a good idea to just call it even.
Ed Harris, one of the most underrated actors of all time
Unfortunately, there are few actor parts in today's movies that are up to his level.
: The funny thing is that it seems the real story of how they got the square and circle to fit is less dramatic. Apparently in the morning they called the engineer who designed (or perhaps helped design) that system, and he figured it out in his head on the drive to work, at which point he called them and told them the process step-by-step.
It's still my favorite scene, alongside the Grandma Lovell assuring her granddaughters that if they could get a washing machine to fly, her Jimmy could land it.
0:23 - 0:27 ""**facepalm** Tell me this isn't a government operation"
Haha, that's probably how I'd react, jeez, seems like a stupid thing to overlook.
Different contractors working on different parts. But they were right, there was just no reason to ever think they might need to interchange the scrubbers between the modules.
It wasn't "a stupid thing to overlook"-it was that they were designed for a different contingency.
The receptacles in the LM were also designed to take the canisters from the PLSS backpacks (which they did do on 13). It would have taken considerable re-engineering to change the CM to use the LM and PLSS canisters, and a considerable redesign to get the LM and PLSS to take the CM canister. And while it was thought that there might be a situation where they had to use the PLSS canisters in the LM to buy them time (like a bad PDI burn that puts them in a crappy orbit and the CSM has to come get them), the working assumption was that any event severe enough to completely knock out the SM was going to kill the crew anyway.
When it comes to working / traveling in space, IMO at least, it seems like there are very few contingencies that should be overlooked since they deal directly with the lives of the astronauts on board.
Again, they planned for the contingency that was thought to be far more likely-the need to use the PLSS canisters in the LM. But not all things can be planned for. Do you push the program back a year to extensively redesign either the CM or the LM and PLSS to allow planning for an event that's almost certain to kill the crew outright?
Finally, remember that the only reason this came up was because the explosion happened in a very narrow window of time that made a rescue possible. Had it happened a couple of hours earlier, the LM would have run out of electrical power. A few hours later, and the descent engine can't give them enough delta V to get back on a free return trajectory and they don't come home
It actually wasn't wasn't overlooked. In real life, they had already accounted for this and had a contingency plan.
One of my favoritemovie quotes, that I never hear anyone ever talk about. "We gotta find a way to make THIS fit into the hole for THIS....using nothing but THAT!
I have always thought that this scene is a great way to introduce young people to the world of engineering. One must solve a problem and do it with limited materials and time.
I think even if the guys didnt make it back, Gene Kranz still would have went down as history as a man that did literally everything he could to save their lives
Nope -Americans like their heros successful
He would have, and few would read it.
Apollo 13 is my favourite film and this scene goes a long way summing up the entire narrative.
Even though they Failed the mission, the success of bringing these guys back and lack of imagination has probably saved billions, if not trillions of dollars and someone’s life by now creating a standardised system and triple redundancy everywhere. Same plugs, cables, slots, battery connectors, everything.
This was the best case of the worst thing to happen in space, for any nation.
I'm old enough (barely !) to remember when the incident happened for real in the early 1970's I guess. I remember as we followed the news at the time (one single channel, of Black and White TV here) that there was a very real danger that they wouldn't be able to get the astronauts back alive. And I tell you, even us folks in other countries on the other side of the world, were cheering, when we heard they got them all back alive. It was idiocy to have non-standard parts. They learnt their lesson that time. Yep, anything that's "mission critical" should have triple redundancy, wherever possible.This movie helps to make the real life incident clearer for people nowadays.
Jim Lovell: "This was a little bit of an engineering goof right here. Square canisters for the CM and round canisters for LEM. No one would ever have thought we had to transfer canisters."
Standardized parts. Its not the first time it happened. In tank building Americans pioneered part standardization using the same (or very similar) suspension bogies and running gear components across all Shermans, the M3 Lee/Grant and even the older M2 Medium Tank, as well as going to great lengths to share as many automotive components and spare parts as possible.
In Germany you could be lucky if one Tiger Is roadwheel fit on another Tiger, because both major subvariants had entirely different roadwheels. One-size-fits-all and precision engineering just dont go well together.
That’s right, it goes in the square hole
That sigh is near perfect, it's the sound of complete disbelief and dejection rolled into one and I've yet to see another scene from a movie that captures this emotion so well.
That line is my favorite from this movie and I’ve used it often to describe insane tasks that have been asked of me and others. I also love the P.S. to that order....”Rapidly”.
One thing I loved about this film was the number of character actors you had playing parts in Mission Control. Clint Howard, Chris Ellis, Marc McClure, Jim Meskimen, the list goes on...
Gabe Jarret and Joe Spano for us 80s geeks 🤓
I used to know an engineer for Apollo 13. His name was Chuck. He was also in the control room for the moon landing. Talk about an honor to know!
There's a reason why NASA sent duct tape up with every mission after that? What a great scene! All Stagehands applaud!
0:33 When a customer buys the wrong parts for his truck and expects you to install them regardless
The neat thing about this is NASA already had this figured out beforehand. They just had pull out the cookbook and read the recipe to them over the radio.
If someone were to tell me to fit a large cube into a small cylinder, using nothing but some trash, the first word that comes out of my mouth would have been "impossible." Assuming I can't just break down the cube into pieces. That's why I'm not qualified to work in NASA.
Michael Song this is the important difference between “impossible” and “unimaginably hard”.
Something difficult will just take a minute, the impossible will take a little longer.
Well, it was also thought impossible to go to the moon. But, it's the NASA.
As an engineer it’s hard not to love this movie. Probably the only movie I can think of where guys who understand math, science and how to build things get to be heroes instead of the guys who know how to fight and kill.
You remember in Kindergarten there was that weird kid in your class that just couldn’t understand shapes? You would see him trying to push a rectangle block through a circle. He’s just not getting it. If that kid grew up and saw this, you would see a giant crowd part ways leading up to him slowly getting up from a chair. He just looking at this and says “I’ve lived my whole life for this moment...”
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂I’m dying...
Making THIS fit into the hole for THIS was not the amazing part….
It was the “using nothing but THAT” that really showed the genius of the people that worked on that project. The limitations were enormous and they were overcome.
According to the History Buffs channel, this scene was added for dramatic effect. NASA DID have a contingency for this.
Absolutely, the LEM lifeboat was a tested idea and square filter fix already tested.
The LEM battery to help restart the CM was another tested contingency.
What I like about this is that no one nags, looks for a scapegoat or says anything about it being impossible. They just recognise the situation and get to work to resolve it.
basically everything the current American government isn't, and most likely never will be
This is how I felt in my first Escape Room.
"If they could get a Washing Machine to fly, my Jimmy can land it."
Easily one of the best quotes in the movie. Always puts a smile on my face.
they called the device they came up with "the mailbox". It was mostly made of plastic and duct tape. Joseph Kerwin dictated the design of the mailbox to Swigert and Haise over the radio. It took them about an hour to complete it, and when they did the CO2 levels started dropping immediately.
Girls doing a project: “OMG, we finished so early! Lets take this extra time to make it as cute and pretty as possible!”
Boys, the night before it’s due: 0:38
Cracking my knuckles as I open power point
Probably boys could build something better.
More like the other way around...
Lol girls should've taken us to space
Eric Portillo In many cases, they did! Margaret Heafield Hamilton, who is actually still alive today, is a software engineer responsible for avoiding an abort of the Apollo 11 landing. That’s not to mention the hundreds of fe,ale calculators that were kept from rising through the ranks in NASA simply because of their gender. Makes you wonder just how much faster we could have gotten to the moon had the barriers of racism and sexism keeping the best and the brightest out of NASA were never there.
every company trying to invent a new ventilator for the COVID19 crisis right now
Ain't that the truth LMAO
This comment didn't age well. No one's mentioned ventilators in months. Now it's "if you ain't rioting, you ain't black", or something like that.
@@luminous6969 whatup troll - "if you aint conflating rioting with peaceful protest, you aint stupid"
@@mcole1987 Peacefully looting and robbing on video lol
@Ragnar Sims i'm sorry you can't keep up :(
My Mom always got mad at me for procrastinating and waiting till the night before it's due to start a project for school.
These guys had 15 minutes.
I was giving myself plenty of time!
If I was one of the guys in that room, I would be that guy who said "...maybe get some coffee going too"
And I'd be the guy who says, "It looks like I picked the wrong week to quit coffee..."
And Leon's getting LAAAARRRGER.....
@@davida.benedetto2281 Yup, there's always that "weird" one in a mission control team.
Coffee - the one thing guaranteed to get the problem-solving juices flowing
That was one of the most powerful scenes in this movie. Always stuck with me. The human ingenuity....
In my opinion, this is one of the five best movies of the 90's.
I love the cooperation, it's so satisfying to see what humans are capable of.
“Better get some coffee going.” The true hero
"We need to find a way to make (square filter) fit in the hole for (round filter) using nothing but (junk on the table)" - my engineering heart fluttered.
my favorite scene in the movie and my favorite quote ("We gotta find a way to make this fit into the hole for this using nothing but that.")
mine has to be Gene's on fitting a square peg in a round hole....
Rapidly
"That's right! It goes in the square hole."
"Tell me this isn't a government operation, John McEnroe's brother."
Jimmy Olson!!
@@bestcoastsxmcp And Dave McFly, Marty's brother.
If tiktok has taught me anything, it's that NASA should make everything square shaped, because everything fits in the square hole.
Going forward, they should probably issue 3D printers as standard equipment on space missions.
"We need to replace X part and all the other ones are broke? We'll just make another one!"
They've gone one better. NASA has equipped the ISS with the Refabricator, which replaced the regular 3D printer that's been in service since 2014. Part of it is a 3D printer. The other part is a plastic recycling system. They can throw broken 3D parts, packaging materials or whatever else they've got up there (and the nice thing about a controlled environment like space flight is the people running it can demand only certain plastics be used) in the top of the machine, and get parts they need at the bottom. Very slick system.
@@jmowreader9555 This is a cool bit of knowledge. Thank you for sharing!
Love how they just dive right in, no hesitation whatsoever.
It's less dramatic when you include the fact that they had done it before the Apollo 13 even flew, so when it came to it it was only a matter of looking at the notes.
That little line at the end lol "Better get some coffee going too someone" cracks me up every time.
Engineers live for the opportunity to MacGyver something like that!
This scene makes me tear up every time. I'm an engineer, I don't know if that has something to do with it.
Notice, no groans or anything else besides a slight grimace and a slight nod of the head! We just got handed a tough job and lives depend on it, so it is going to get done!!!
"Hey, you know what? Hide a bolt right there. While you're at it, make it a different size" - *Said Every Engineer Ever*
I think this was the peak of coming together, ingenuity, genius.
Again, this shows the genius of not only Ron Howard as a director but the flight crew in general. 1,000 things could have gone wrong on this mission and yet with their ingenuity they were able to get the crew home.
This is one of those great films where the enemy is death and the every character is doing their best to work together to beat it.
could you even imagine the pressure of being in that room, and trying to find a way to save the astronauts lives? plus the media? and the american public? and that's just on the ground.... imagine how the actual astronauts felt!
Love this scene. Accurately depicts the highs and lows of engineering. No coordination in the design phase, but exceptional skills at problem solving.
Even if in real life this was on hand as part of a contingency plan, this scene is awesome.
The guy that's dumps out the first box of contents, you can see him smiling at the camera cause one of the items almost hits the camera
I'm just rather surprised that in a movie of this caliber that the actors at mission control are calling Gene Kranz by his first name.
From what I've read, nobody would dare call him "Gene".
He was referred to as "Flight" (radio call sign) or Mr Kranz.
That's it.
That laugh he does before saying "Tell me this isn't a government operation", it is so very true.
“Only best engineers and scientists are working on a solution to this problem”
The scientists and engineers; ok this solution is going to involve a lot of duct tape
I know its dramatized for effect, but damn if this isnt one of my favorite bits of the movie.
"This just isn't a contingency we've remotely looked at." A phrase we will unfortunately hear many times during the wide spread use of of self-driving cars, trucks, ships and aircraft.
Except it was. This wasn't a line from the transcripts - because in reality, it most certainly was a contingency they looked as - as the procedure to construct an adapter was already developed long before Apollo 11 even flew; much less Apollo 13.
@@willoughbykrenzteinburg which is odd and makes me wonder about the specific differences in filter and why they needed the two shapes
@@FFKonoko I dont think they *_needed_* two shapes. It was just an oversight. One of many. The program was very far from perfect.
One minor inaccuracy is when the engineer said "This isn't a contingency we've even remotely looked at" While no procedure existed (And that's what the men in the scene then worked on) a possibility of having to use the CM modules in the LM had been looked at. So it as a minor matter to come up with a way to get them adapted. But the concept of having to use the lithium hydroxide canisters from the CM in the LM had in fact been studied before.
Smart people rock!
It also shows just how dangerous it was to be an astronaut.
My favorite scene in the movie
This scene changed the way I look at problem- solving permanently
"Tell me this isn't a government operation." 🤣🤣🤣
it's more noble to fail without disaster than to simply win. Winning is the easy part, making sure you fail without falling far is the hard part.
These guys were called the Tiger Team
Libertarian Nationalist why?
Originally called the White Team, it was an early idea of NASA for dealing with problems with the technology or systems. They are a group of diverse experts that work well with one another in order to solve a difficult conflict regardless of how little time and how high the stakes. Nowadays tiger teams are practically everywhere.
My engineering teacher loved referring to this movie. He said it was real-time engineering.
Sadly as much a great film this was, theres some glaring "liberties" taken. The 2 contractors who built the LM and the CM has different designs and thus different filters which as they carried plenty for the mission, it wasnt remotely thought that they would need to interchange. In the Movie, it is portrayed that the men suddenly had to design & build the "letterbox" filter BUT it had already been designed around Apollo 8 by the engineers and they simply sent the instructions up to the men to build it with what they had. This info comes from footage from the engineers talking about the designs and how they simulated and thought of every possible situation except the explosion of both oxygen tanks which they reasoned would have destroyed the craft anyway so they had no contingency for that. However one tank exploded and crippled all the plumbing to the other tank and all the redundant valves ect making it a perfect? design was now unusable and the 2nd tank just leaked out. The later SM's had a extra oxygen tank on the other side of the SM and only one tank is needed anyway for the approx 10 days trip but they installed 2 next to each other just as a backup. Also the reentry part of the trip, the guidance guys claiming that the trajectory was shallowing out - coming in not steep enough into atmosphere. The claim is its caused by lack of moon rocks- i doubt if the smart guys would have overlooked the lighter craft in their numbers, the fact is they never knew why they shallowed but it may have been continue venting from whatever was ruptured very slowly giving minute thrust over time up to reentry. That added a very long reentry phase of over 4 minutes but finally the voice came from the CM that all was well and the chutes opened. Basically the film tries to portray the very personal work of just 1 guy working on reentry power spikes for powering up the CM from the LM batteries backflowing on the ground simulator. Fact is ALL the engineers from all the companies were in the simulators night and day both at NASA and at the headquarters in their own sims , working on solutions, so theres no I in team at NASA, it is a group effort totally. Astronaut Scott and others? helped in making the film and i believe there was disagreement on the authenticity? ect of the facts and all that. So this was a film not a documentary and with great performances by the actors and brilliant fiim making and CGI but is what it is...
@Rb Hal They had a book they developed with contingency plans for any possible SNAFU they could think of in the time available. Some problems they knew there would have no realistic solution. The movie did have a lot of bullshit in it tho as is usual with movies. For example the astronauts getting all emotional like... well actors do. That never happened. I consider that disrespectful portraying astronauts as if they are arts and entertainment people.
I've been told that Apollo 13 is a myth. Just a giant government conspiracy. There was emergency in space. ........Of course I'm joking!
What's truly amazing at least to me is that the guy that solved this major problem in real life did so in his head while driving to work.
I wish I wasn't a big failure in life and had a job that is important as the shit some people do
I know your feeling bro, one day, one day maybe. Failure makes us strong and gives new insight others doesn't have.
Apollo 13 proved the age-old fact, "For every problem there is always a solution."