What do you think of this fact?
On the evening of April 13, 1970, Apollo 13 is about 200,000 miles from Earth. Then comes a bang: an oxygen tank explodes in the service module. Jack Swigert radios the famous line: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
The moon lander becomes a lifeboat
On board are James Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. Now the goal is to get the crew safely back to Earth. The three move into the lunar module, which NASA calls their lifeboat. The catch: the lander was designed to support 2 men for 2 days. Now it had to keep 3 men going for about 4 days.
After a day and a half in the lander, a warning light comes on. Carbon dioxide in the cabin air has built up to a dangerous level. The lander only had a limited supply of lithium hydroxide, the stuff that scrubs CO2 out of the air. The command module still had canisters, but they were square. The openings in the lander: round.
Craft hour with 60 engineers
On the ground, engineer Ed Smylie took over with about 60 other engineers. His summary: “You can’t put a square peg in a round hole, and that’s what we had.” The team had less than 2 days, and it could only use materials already on board.
The fix: an adapter made of 2 command module canisters, plastic garment bags, cardboard from the cover of the flight plan, a spacesuit hose and a roll of gray duct tape. It was designed and tested on the ground at the Manned Spacecraft Center first. Then mission control talked the crew through it step by step: where to find each part and how to build the thing. NASA calls the result the “mailbox.”
Why duct tape of all things? Smylie put it like this: “If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape.”
Cold, but home
It still wasn’t cozy. The temperature dropped to 38 degrees Fahrenheit, and condensation formed on all the walls. On April 17, 1970, the three splashed down gently in the Pacific near Samoa and were picked up by the USS Iwo Jima.
Lovell lost 14 pounds on the mission. The crew lost a combined 31.5 pounds, nearly 50 percent more than other crews.
Ed Smylie died in 2025 at 95. Three astronauts, one roll of gray tape, and in the end, square finally connected to round.