Why every engineer should watch Apollo 13

Apollo 13 has to be one of my favourite movies of all time. It is one of the few movies that really celebrates engineering and the incredible solutions that you see when you get a group of motivated and focused engineers in one room.

It also gives a somewhat idealised version of what being an engineer is all about — solving the difficult problems and saving the day. Whilst I don’t have to deal with challenges on quite the scale of the Apollo 13 mission, I feel all engineers could all use the occasional reminder of what we bring to the table.

Houston, we have a problem — Jim Lovell

Like many of the quotes and scenes I’ll mention, they’re more a product of Hollywood than what was actually said. It was felt that “we have a problem” sounded more impactful than what was really said “we’ve had a problem”. Still, that doesn’t diminish the inspiration that we can take away from this movie, especially for those of us who are or aspire to be engineers.

Failure is not an option — Gene Kranz

Although Gene never actually said those words, this statement really captures the essence of a critical situation. There are lives on the line, nothing is working as it’s supposed to and if solutions can’t be found in time, people will die.

Thankfully daily life and death situations aren’t the reality for most of us, but we’ve all been there when we just knew we had to come through with a solution and there was a lot riding on us. It’s our time to shine!

Let’s work the problem people. Let’s not make things worse by guessing. — Gene Kranz

These are the words to remember the next time something fails in production or doesn’t work as expected. If you’re just working on something on your own laptop, well, there’s probably not much of a penalty for getting things wrong. However when you’re operating a service or platform that millions of people depend on, you can’t afford to make things worse.

Engineers generally know to do things by the numbers. They know the process, they helped write the play book, but somehow when its crunch time, it’s all too easy to try a quick fix here or a quick adjustment there. Instead we should heed this advice — work the problem, follow the process and don’t just guess and hope for the best.

I don’t care about what anything was DESIGNED to do, I care about what it CAN do. — Gene Kranz

At this point in the movie, it’s obvious that the mission to land on the moon is over. All that matters is getting the astronauts home. As things descend into chaos, one of the comments is that the lunar module was never designed for anything like this. Gene then silences the room with the above quote.

When things go wrong, sometimes we just have to put our heads together and come up with solutions. It doesn’t matter what the thing was originally supposed to do, the situation has changed. All that matters is what we can make it do now.

This is often where we first get a taste for the importance of not engineering ourselves into a corner. We start to experience the reality of changing requirements and the need to sometimes completely change direction. Once experienced, we start to be a little more conservative in our designs and we think just that little bit more about what it may end up being used for. And whether it’s software or a booster rocket, it never hurts to know your design like the back of your hand…

Ken, you’re telling me what you need. I’m telling you what we have to work with at this point. I’m not making this stuff up. — John Aaron

This is one of my favourite quotes and I wish we all had the courage to respond so candidly when people make unreasonable or impossible demands. It’s not easy to have those sorts of conversations but although they can be uncomfortable, that discomfort is often only a fraction of the discomfort that will be felt if the other person gets their way, either by being the loudest voice in the room or pulling rank.

Being able to hold your ground, and defend your position with facts, data and principles, is one of the traits of a great engineer.

We’ve got to find a way to make this, fit into the hole for this, using nothing but that — Technican

Another favourite of mine, the very real need to make a square peg fit into a round hole. Again, this one had a lot riding on it as the only way to lower the near fatal CO2 levels was to make the cartridge for the command module’s air filter fit in the lunar module.

If that wasn’t hard enough, they could only use the materials the astronauts had on board. This ended up including a sock, a plastic urine bag and the front cover from the flight plan.

This is engineering right on the edge of what’s possible — finding workable solutions under insanely strict requirements.

From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it’s not a miracle, we just decided to go. — Jim Lovell

Sometimes all we really need to do to get somewhere is simply decide that that is where we want to go. Engineers have a somewhat unique ability to create new technologies and set new directions. Often all that needs to happen is someone needs to pick the direction to go in.

Houston, we’re at stable one. The ship is secure. This is Apollo 13 signing off. — Jim Lovell

I think I’ll leave it there as this post is already getting a lot longer than I originally anticipated. I think we can all benefit from inspiring movies and movies like Apollo 13 really make me proud and excited to be an engineer. It makes me want to go out and get my hands dirty solving the toughest challenges I can find. I imagine I’m not the only one who feels that way.

For now though, this is Apollo 13, signing off…