The Succesful Failure of Apollo 13

As much as it would be interesting to explore the international relations and domestic policy that allowed Neil Armstrong to set foot on the moon, it is arguably even more insightful to look at the missions that went wrong. The engineers at NASA developed communities that in many ways can be looked at as a microcosm for a body politic governed by engineers. By studying “Apollo 13,” a film based on one of the missions that did not go as planned, I hope to shed light on why democracies have much to learn from how the mission control center and the general public handled the crisis.

Democracies are built on dialogue and deliberation. Although there certainly was a lot of chattering in the control center, it would be hard to say that there was deliberation. In an ideal world, democracies would have long, arduous, and productive conversations in which the body politic thinks collectively about their problems. The mission control center appears more authoritarian in the sense that most men reported directly to the flight director. As Jim Lovell, pilot of the Apollo 13 aircraft put it, “the pilots … were at the center of [any] problem. … Next in line were the individual console controllers in Houston. … [and] Ultimately responsible for [getting problems] solved was the flight director.” The movie supports Jim’s statement by having Gene be the only one who can determine courses of action and everything else is either suggestions or disrupting noise.

There is a clear line of command (most likely borrowed from the military) that is reinforced by the architectural design of the command center and the clothing of the officers. The way everyone is sitting down in front of their computers with the director at the top and center greatly contrasts with the round and open Athenian amphitheaters that were designed to facilitate discourse and are present in many of today’s legislative bodies. The mission control center was probably designed this way because decisions had to be data-driven, not discussion-driven. However, once the oxygen exploded and things started to go wrong, the team repeatedly transitions to a room centered around a blackboard. Here, discussion flows more freely as people propose their different courses of action. One can assume that this dynamic would not have been present had everything gone as planned. The dynamic of reporting to a superior and the superior telling the crew what to do increases efficiency. To illustrate, look at China’s significant technological progress in automated vehicles and e-payments. Policies are put into action much faster when there are strong institutions that have the power to enforce them. Just as well, the flight director in many ways represents the institution, mediating knowledge, coordinating action, and motivating his team.

Eugene Francis “Gene” Kranz is an American Aerospace engineer best known for serving as Flight Director during Apollo 13. In the movie, he is accurately portrayed as a man who can keep composure under pressure. In multiple scenes, when everyone is talking over each other, he brings order by saying phrases such as: “Okay people, one at a time” and “Listen up people, quiet down.” The audience can see him rise up to his duty as mediator and enforcer of order. Even his famous vest, despite being ridiculed by the other officers, gives him the ethos necessary to deliver commands and steer the direction of his ship, since he has used it for numerous Apollo missions in the past. He is also the only one that does not solely focus on a monitor, and thus, is able to see things from a broader perspective. This is useful because when there is uncertainty, he can redirect the team to look at different information. For example, before the scene of the photograph below he said “Let’s look at things from a point of status” recognizing the need to look at the problem from another point of view. To this one of the men responded, “From my chair here, this is the only option.”

This stare-down of Gene and the console controller is a powerful scene to examine. The console controller has just offered Gene a solution that could help save the astronauts, but Gene has to make sure that the agent is convinced of what he is saying given that the stakes are so high. In a democratic system, every voice is heard, but anything that is said can be put under scrutiny. In the end, Gene agrees to tell the astronauts to shut down the valves of the fuel cells, but this does not solve their problems. While the suggestion may have been well founded, Gene failed to account for another characteristic of democratic systems that makes them good for decision making. In democratic systems, information is shared among everyone in order to have a more comprehensive picture. As the console controller said, “From my chair here, this is the only option.” There cannot be a narrower picture than that. Organizational behaviorist, Adam Grant, explains that faulty decision-making usually occurs, when only one perspective is pushed forward disregarding any other information that might be available. In this case, Gene acted on the information that only one of the controllers gave him. Unfortunately, NASA did not learn the perils of undemocratic decision-making until 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded just minutes after liftoff killing all of the crew. The explosion was largely attributed to faulty management and mishandling of information.

Information is one of the most precious assets of a democratic republic. Citizens use it to deliberate and seek truth. Not only is there expected to be a sharing of information but there is also expected to be clearly defined problems and an array of responses or solutions from which to choose. For engineers, facts are important because they are the basis of any calculations they make. For this reason, they demand information that is accurate and exact. This is represented in the movie in three main occasions. The first one is when John and Ken are trying to figure out a procedure that will not require as much power, given that they have very limited. John tells Ken three or four inches and Ken responds: “Damn it John, is it three or four?!” The second is when Gene says: “God damn it I don’t want another estimate. I want the procedures NOW!” And the third is when Gene says, “Let’s work the problem people, let’s not make things worse by guessing.” All these responses show the audience that engineers are not in the business of guessing. Everything must be accounted for with exactitude in order to be as efficient as possible.

One of the first displays of perfectionism is made by Ken after he, Fred, and Jim have performed a series of exhausting simulations on reentry procedure. Jim tells Ken that he did a great job, but Ken says they need to try it again because they used too much fuel. Some viewers might have blamed Ken for being too exacting, but they will see later on the importance of not relying on “close enough” as measures of performance. For engineers, it is evident that consistency is important, which can only be achieved through mastering one’s assigned task through long hours of practice. As part of a larger team and with lives at stake, everyone has to deliver. That is why Gene famously says, “Failure is not an option.”

Engineers are fixers at heart: they make things work, not the other way around. To facilitate this, they follow procedures step by step, and get from A → B in the most linear way possible. Two examples of procedures in the movie are found in the manual on the aircraft and the series of steps for reentry, which are either shown or talked about various times throughout the movie. Engineers have so much trust in procedures that when things start going wrong, they turn to them to see if they did not follow the procedure correctly. Consider the scene when the astronauts lose control of the aircraft. Gene asks his team “Did we miss a step here? What the hell happened.” And they all respond in unison *with both hands up*: “I don’t know.”

As everyone starts realizing that despite having followed the rules to the letter, things are still not working out for them, they start to reject procedure and even perhaps, the institutions who created it. When Jack was told to rip the manual apart, he answered “Gladly,” as it had proven itself to be useless. Towards the end, when they are waiting for the procedure to get back home, Jack starts doubting whether or not there is a way to go back. All along, the three astronauts had followed the instructions of mission control. After realizing they could not keep relying on them, the astronauts began taking matters into their own hands. Jim informs Houston with an authoritative and demanding tone: “Here is what you are going to do, you’re going to get that procedure up to us, whatever it is, and we are going to go over it step by step. No follow-ups.” Later, they all disconnect their biomed sensors so the physicians cannot track them back on NASA headquarters.

The act of literally disconnecting from authority is representative of a larger feeling of dissent that flourishes when governments do not fulfill their promises. The decline of participation in political activities is often attributed to disappointment in the established political structures and the belief that they are not there to help. When they doubt whether or not Houston has a way of bringing them back home, Jim, Jack, and Fred start realizing that they are serving to an extent as instruments of a larger system that is not obliged to save them, especially if the costs are too high. In his autobiography, Jim Lovell explains that NASA had astronauts doing public appearances to lobby for more government funding. He relates, rather remorsefully, that while he was at the White House shaking hands and making small talk, his colleagues from Apollo 1 were being asphyxiated. As skilled and intelligent as astronauts are, they still serve as chess pieces in a game controlled by the will and interest of the majority. Unfortunately, as Jim’s wife eventually finds out, the public does not always have the astronauts at the top of their agenda.

News networks did not initially cover Apollo 13 because it was not exciting or inflammatory enough. A NASA representative told Jim’s wife that they had “made going to the Moon as exciting as taking a trip to Pittsburgh.” It was clear that the American public was losing interest in space exploration. As the state representative put it in the beginning of the movie, they had already beaten Russia to the moon, what else was there left to do? Of course, as Jim replied, Spain did not stop supporting New World exploration after Christopher Columbus stepped foot in America. If the Apollo 13 mission had been carried out without any bumps in the road, it is very likely that the nation would have stopped caring about NASA’s programs. It took the drama of three astronauts coming face to face with their deaths to regain the interest of the public. As the movie demonstrates, NASA was well aware of how critical this mission was for their existence and development. When Gene hears the NASA director say, “This would be the worst disaster NASA has ever experienced.” he replies: “With all due respect, Sir, I believe this is going to be our finest hour.” The Apollo 13 is famously described as a “successful failure” because although the crew never made it to the moon, NASA was able to bring them back home safely (which boosted their reputation).

One of the big reasons that the mission became appealing to such a large number of people is that it pushed the boundaries of human nature. The technical aspects of going to space had already been conquered; most things in the spacecraft could be controlled by the push of a button. Now that technology was failing, the crew had to learn how to fly the aircraft all over again. The mission was no longer about following mechanical tasks they had practiced 1,000 times or more, but rather paper, pencil, and brain. The expertise and intelligence of the astronauts and the mission control team were put to the test and it was their chance to prove themselves capable of solving the problems at hand. Cultural historian and media scholar at the University of Virginia, Siva Vaidhyanathan, says that “As a technology enters a culture or society, it deeply alters the cognitive capacities of the members of that society.” Although engineers are highly admired for developing the technologies that power the world, there is a notion that our reliance on technology has made things “too easy,” as easy as the press of a button:

Anyone can follow instructions and push buttons. What sets engineers apart and gives them the rank they have in society is their ability to crunch numbers, solve problems in innovative ways, and think critically. The scenes when the audience admires the astronauts and the mission control team the most are arguably not the ones above where they are merely pressing buttons but rather, the ones below, where they are crunching numbers and being problem solvers. Even the tempo of the music starts getting faster when the astronauts have to power down the computer and, as Jim says, “put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat.” This marks the beginning of the humans in the movie taking back the agency they have lost to technology and using their expertise to engineer a way back home. As Gene Kranz puts it in his autobiography, “What we could not accomplish through technology, or procedures, and operating manuals, we might be able to manage by drawing on a priceless fund of experience, accumulated over almost a decade… These three astronauts were beyond our physical reach. But not beyond the reach of human imagination [and] inventiveness.”

Sociologists and engineers even have a term for the accumulation of things we must depend on when technology stops being useful: “the Human Factor.” This includes things like courage, determination, leadership, and communication. In the movie, we can see how different people react to technology glitches in different ways. When the Lovell’s car stops working, Marilyn begins to get anxious because she sees it as a bad omen. When the projector does not work, Gene brusquely pushes it aside and grabs a piece of chalk instead. When it seems like almost everything in the aircraft has turned on them, Jack bangs his head on it and calls it a “piece of shit.” And after he does this, Fred blames him for stirring the tanks and causing all their troubles even though Jack had no way of knowing the oxygen tank was going to explode and he was just following orders. These are all examples of individuals getting frustrated or trying to find blame for the failures of technology. However, the best engineers understand that technology sometimes does not work as it was designed to; they know there is a reason for all the master alarms and multiple warning signs. Because of this, engineers do not give up but rather find another way.

A big part of “the human factor” is resourcefulness — saying “okay, let’s work with what we have.” The audience sees Ken being resourceful as he finds a procedure that is feasible with the limited power they have. They also see a team of engineers figuring out “a way to put a square peg in a round hole” in order for the astronauts to use the scrubbers from the command module on the LEM. “I don’t care about what anything was designed to do, I care about what it can do,” Gene tells them. All of these examples point to the fact that the engineers that exhibit “the human factor” the most are the ones who do not need to rely on technology to solve their problems.

The film “Apollo 13” invites its audience to see how a group of engineers worked through a challenge that at first glance, appeared impossible. It accurately depicts the interplay of the social, political, and technological forces that brought Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert back home. By looking at the dynamics and chain of command between the mission control center and the astronauts, viewers get a glimpse of how technocratic models of government would function. Most importantly, the movie describes how engineers react when technology suddenly becomes useless and makes viewers ponder what implications this would have in a government where engineers are first in command.