Apollo 13 a Square Peg Solution

The Mailbox

The law of the situation was absolute. There would be no manual, no procedure written in advance for a crisis this specific. It was a perfect, terrible embodiment of what some call Gilbert’s Law: when you take on a job, finding the best way to get the result is your responsibility. No one tells you how. Smylie’s team laid out the inventory of scraps. They had the square canisters from the command module. They had plastic bags used for stowing astronaut belongings. They had the cardboard covers ripped from the spiral-bound flight plan manuals. They had hoses from a pair of spacesuits, and, famously, they had rolls of gray duct tape. The room filled with the tense energy of invention. Ideas were tried and discarded. One engineer suggested running a hose from the command module's system, but the ship was too cold, too dead. They needed a self-contained device. The final design began to emerge, a Frankenstein's monster of engineering. It looked less like NASA hardware and more like a high school science fair project. They took a square canister and enclosed it in a plastic bag to direct the airflow. They used a suit hose to connect it to the lunar module's environmental system. They needed something rigid to keep the bag open and allow air to pass through the canister, so they fashioned a support from the flight plan cardboard. Then they sealed the whole thing with belts of duct tape, wrapped sticky-side out to hold it all together. They called it "the mailbox." As one engineer built it, another wrote down every single step. They couldn’t send up a schematic; every instruction would have to be read aloud, clearly and precisely, to three exhausted men running out of time in the dark. After an hour, the replica was finished. It was ugly, but it worked. The team in Houston had turned a box of junk into a lung. Now, they had to teach the astronauts how to build one just like it, floating in the frozen silence of space.