Ed Smylie, Who Saved the Apollo 13 Crew With Duct Tape, Dies at 95He and his team of NASA engineers jumped into action to help three astronauts bound for the moon. His quick thinking earned him a shout-out from Richard Nixon.
L'influence de Ed Smylie est considérable encore de nos jours, en quelque sorte l'inventeur du
Hackathon /
Quick Thinking puisqu'il ne disposa avec son équipe que de 2 jours pour confectionner une solution avec les objets hétéroclites disponibles à bord d'Apollo 13 !
Les cinéphiles se souviendront encore longtemps de la fameuse réplique reprise dans le film Apollo 13 de Ron Howard :
To survive, the astronauts would somehow need to refresh the canisters of lithium hydroxide that would absorb the poisonous gases in the lunar excursion module. There were extra canisters in the command module, but they were square; the lunar module ones were round.
“You can’t put a square peg in a round hole, and that’s what we had,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary “XIII” (2021).
He and about 60 other engineers had less than two days to invent a solution using materials already onboard the spacecraft. The crisis is depicted in Ron Howard’s 1995 blockbuster film, “Apollo 13,” starring Tom Hanks as Mr. Lovell, Kevin Bacon as Mr. Swigert and Bill Paxton as Mr. Haise.