Apollo 13, Film from Ron Howard, 1995. With Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Ed Harris.
All drawings by Margit Schild.
www.less-art.de, schule-des-provisorischen.de
Dramaturgy Consultant: Zach Clarke
Music: blackSnow by airtone (c) copyright 2021 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. https://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/63513
Supported by Amadeu Antonio Stiftung
On April 11,1970—after the explosion of an oxygen tank—the Apollo 13 mission had to abandon its landing on the moon. The damaged systems required the rescue of the crew. In the Apollo 13 movie, NASA flight director Gene Kranz introduces his Houston team members to this new situation: ‘I want you to forget the flight plan. From this moment on we are improvising a new mission’ (Howard, 1995, 1:04:45).
The explosion not only prevented the landing on the moon, but it was not at all clear how the crew could be rescued. Despite all emergency training, in this case, something happened that nobody had expected. Among other technical improvisations, the development/the design of the makeshift air filter created a way out of a rather hopeless situation.
The engineers have checked how the arsenal of on-board resources is equipped, in other words, a visual inspection of all things available. And tried to put things together in the right way, like a puzzle, they looked for the right pieces that fit together, moved them back and forth, touched them, tried this and that, until they finally created a thing, a construction, that functioned as a CO 2- filter.
How is this possible? This episode takes a closer look at the creative mechanisms at work here and how they may be relevant to every day problems.