The Legacy of the Washing Machine Pilot
Rest in peace, Mr. Lovell.
[This blog will always be free to read, but it’s also how I pay my bills. If you have suggestions or feedback on how I can earn your paid subscription, shoot me an email: cmclymer@gmail.com. And if this is too big of a commitment, I’m always thankful for a simple cup of coffee.]
The current population of the earth is 8.2 billion people. The estimate for the total number of human beings who have ever lived is around 117 billion people over hundreds of thousands of years.
What do you have in common with human beings who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago?
Not a whole lot, but you have the Moon. Everyone who ever lived has stared up at the Moon. It’s the greatest cultural symbol in human history, and I’d claim nothing else comes close. Not even the Sun.
In all that time, out of all those people, only 12 have ever walked on the Moon.
If I ask you to name someone on that list, you’ll almost certainly say Neil Armstrong, the first person to do so. Some of you will guess two names: Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the second person to do so.
I am willing to bet every dollar in my pocket that very, very few of you can name more than two people on that list, but I’m sure most of you have heard about Jim Lovell.
He died yesterday at 97. He never walked on the Moon. He got closer than most. He flew around it. But he never walked on it.
He was the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, which lifted off and away from the Earth on April 11th, 1970. It was intended to be the third spacecraft to land on the Moon. Commander Lovell was expected to be the fifth person to walk on the lunar surface.
But a few days into their journey, an oxygen tank in the service module ruptured, causing an explosion, which damaged the spacecraft’s systems and depleted their critical oxygen supply.
Suddenly, getting to the Moon was out of the question. Survival became their sole mission.
They were in a tiny spacecraft quickly being sapped of oxygen and running on a computer system with 32KB of ROM (read-only-memory), which is roughly the equivalent of a short book or 2-3 seconds of an audio file. The iPhone you’re holding in your hand is 176,000x more powerful.
Oh, and they were going in the wrong direction. The Earth is the other way.
Imagine your life’s goal of walking on the Moon has suddenly, without warning, slipped away, and you have no time to mourn that loss. You have to get your crew back safely, and things are looking pretty damn grim.
Commander Lovell’s crew worked with NASA ground control on a plan that was so audacious to us normal folk that it’s difficult to grasp: using the Moon’s gravitational pull, they had to slingshot their hobbling, wounded, tiny spacecraft around the lunar backside and hope the resulting free return trajectory had them headed in the right direction and with enough speed to get home.
Their electrical systems were shut off, which meant it was ludicrously cold. The crew were hungry and tired and freezing. There was little water and oxygen.
And even after nailing the free return trajectory, there was no guarantee they were getting through the Earth’s atmosphere without burning to a crisp or bouncing off the atmosphere or coming in so fast that the emergency parachutes wouldn’t be enough to stop their little spacecraft from slamming into the Earth like a speeding car into a brick wall.
But they did it.
All the things that went wrong, all the things that could have gone wrong, all the discomforts, all the reasons to have intense fear and severe anxiety, and yet, Commander Jim Lovell and John Swigert and Fred Haise somehow made it back safely.
It feels like a stunner wrapped in a phenomenon inside nesting dolls of miracles.
But it wasn’t really about miracles. It was thousands of hours of training and enormous grit and profound teamwork and exceptional leadership.
The famous quote from the film Apollo 13—in which Tom Hanks plays Commander Lovell—is from his mother: “If they could get a washing machine to fly, my Jimmy could land it.”
It’s a great line and also inaccurate. What she actually said, according to Commander Lovell, was this quip: “I’m just glad he’s in a flying washing machine.”
I like that even more. It’s beautiful gallows humor and underscores the sheer difficulty of what he and his crew accomplished, which seems impossible to the rest of us.
Commander Lovell died yesterday without ever having walked on the Moon, but he is more well-known to people than almost anyone who graced the lunar surface because he brought his crew back safely in one of the all-time great scientific feats.
Rest in peace, Mr. Lovell.
This is why I love you so much. Thank you for bringing back a little bit of pride for my country.
You’re always a good read, but every now and then, you knock one so far out of the park that it winds up in the clouds. This is a fine, full appreciation of how the rescue happened and the grace and courage of the men involved. Such a contrast to the pathetic, soul-killing ugliness of the current Pentagon’s war on trans service members.