OK, back to our regularly scheduled program. 🚀 🌙 Fifty years ago, today, Houston instructed Apollo 13 how to cobble together a connection between the square CO2 scrubbers in the Command Module ECU to work with the round discs in the Lunar Module lifeboat which was drawn into heroic use beyond its original breathing oxygen budget (designed for a lunar landing of two people, not a round trip to Earth with three). This was one of the finest moments for duct tape… when failure was not an option.
This large artifact in our space museum at work is an original Apollo Environmental Control Unit (ECU) from 1967, a complex beast performing numerous functions including: air cooling and heating; humidity control; ventilation to suits and cabin; air filtration and critically to Apollo 13, CO2 and odor removal. It is very rare; I have never seen another in private hands. I also have a spare Lithium Hydroxide dual canister system (as seen the right) the heroic subject of a Pilat painting.
And the Apollo 13 drama as portrayed in the movie was a bit distorted. Astronaut Ken Mattingly (original Apollo 13 flight crew) writes: “The beauty in this whole thing was, these guys were so prepared for even the most implausible things. They knew no one had ever simulated exactly what happened, but they had simulated the kind of stress that could be applied to the system and the people in it. They knew what their options were and had some ideas already in place about where to go. In the movie, they played it like nobody ever thought of this. They dumped a bunch of junk on the table and said, ‘Can you figure it out?’ That was the only way the movie could convey how we got there. In reality, there was total familiarity with the hardware.” — from https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/greatest-space-hack-ever
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