During my “secure in place” staycation, I read Lost Moon by James Lovell, the Apollo 13 mission commander. Fifty-years ago today, the crew of the Apollo 13 safety returned to Earth. In a heroic act of ingenuity both by the crew and NASA’s mission control, they famously overcame a near fatal disaster. Fifty-five hours into their flight, Captain James Lovell, radioed to earth one of the now most famous lines ever uttered from outer space: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
By 1970, it seemed like everyone except me seemed inured about going to the moon. While I remained fixated on spaceflight and dreamed of becoming an astronaut, my family went on with their lives here on earth. On April 17th, my mother was watching “Here’s Lucy” on CBS when she called me into the living room. The comedy show was interrupted for a special report by Walter Cronkite. Back then, special reports were not the red chyrons that seem to always crawl along the bottom of our TV screens today. The Apollo 13 mission to land on the moon suddenly turned into a mission to save astronaut lives. Now America and the rest of the world had their eyes glued to televisions and radios.
It only took a flip of a switch. The command module spacecraft’s oxygen tank exploded after Jack Swigert switched on the stirring fan in the cryogenic oxygen tank. By now everyone knows the story thanks to the Academy Award winning movie directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks. Many years passed before James Lovell came to grips with what happened, for him to realize the failure of Apollo 13 was actually a triumph of ingenuity, hard work, innovation and perseverance. What can we learn from this glorious triumph over adversity? There are a few lessons that might serve us well in handling the pandemic.
- Try not to think of the odds of survival. Last month after the first reports on mortality from the coronavirus were published, I went bat-crazy extrapolating my own odds based on age, gender, and medical history. It wasn’t pretty. Lovell advises never to think of the odds. “So, I concentrated on not what’s going to happen if I don’t get home, and instead on what can I do to get home.”
- A half-baked fix is likely to be insidious. The tank that exploded was dropped during installation. Engineers attempted to see if the tank still functioned properly, but their op-check was not comprehensive, and some key functionality was not tested to ensure it still worked. Fifty years later, 2,109 lifesaving medical ventilators in the US stockpile failed to work because they weren’t maintained after a federal contract lapsed last summer. Others come out of storage with depleted batteries, missing oxygen hoses and other issues.
- Call for help when you need it. Rely on outside resources. New York Governor Cuomo was accused of whining about the need for more medical ventilators. He needed 30,000, but the federal government only supplied four hundred initially. Another 4,000 were expected weeks later. But Cuomo kept pressing for them and within a week, far-flung governments from China, California, and Oregon had sent more ventilators and PPE materials to New York. Lovell writes, “You never know what events are going to transpire to get you home.”
- Take charge of the situation. Don’t wait for someone to fix it for you. With little testing available and no significant federal response beyond international travel restrictions at the time, many states had already called for strident stay-at-home orders. “There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened,” Lovell writes. “To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen.”
- Never give up. No matter how hopeless the situation may seem, there’s always a better solution than ignoring the problem. “Be thankful for problems. If they were less difficult, someone with less ability might have your job.”
