Apollo 13
Last night I watched for the umpeenth time, this Ron Howard film about the troubled flight to the moon manned by Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert (last minute replacement for Ken Mattingly) and Fred Haise. The roles were played by Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon (Gary Sinise) and Bill Paxton. Ed Harris plays Gene Kranz, the Flight Director at Mission Control in Houston. Every time I rewatch a movie I see new things or think new thoughts based on my state of mind and attentiveness during the viewing. I almost always am reminded of the starting scenes, which somehow always leave my awareness and memory for some odd reason. This film begins with the moon landing in July, 1969 when Apollo 11 set down with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin while Michael Collins waited patiently for them in the command capsule. The themes that struck me on this viewing were how varied and ordinary these men with the right stuff were, not to mention how young they all were when they were given this momentous responsibility to propel our nation into the unknown and triumph for liberal democracy.
People of my age grew up with several phenomenon of geopolitical importance. There was the Cold War and all of us doing drills where we had to hide under our desks or sit against the cinder block walls of the locker rooms with all our classmates. We would sit there and alternately think about the nuclear winter oblivion we were told to expect in the worst of circumstances, and then we would think about the recess time we were missing out in the school yard. I went to grade school in Wisconsin for the most part (grades 3-6), so I remember good weather and Wisconsin winter weather, which was epic. That school yard I mentioned was good for more than just recess. It was quite near our neighborhood and it had some significant hills. Specifically, it had a hill which had a midway plateau where the local Indians had placed a bear mound. A bear mound was a burial mound used by the Winnebago Indians that lived in and around Madison, Wisconsin. Now a days, the Winnebago go by Ho-Chunk Nation for some reason, but they are the same crowd that used seven or eight animal forms to make their burial mounds. It takes little imagination or drawing skill to imagine the shape of a bear mound. Now imagine it sitting laterally on this plateau of a hill with a large tree on either side. Now imagine the upper part of the hill formed in such a way that there is a natural ski jump-like runway heading directly down to the bear mound. I really should go back to Wisconsin just to see this playground to see what has become of it. The bear mound gives me a fair chance that it has survived in some form of park or playground.
That bear mound figured very prominently in our summer and winter adventures in those days. In the summer, we would launch ourselves on our bikes down that upper hill towards the back of the bear mound and see how far we could go in the air without killing ourselves. The rutted hill always slowed us down enough to keep us safe. But the winter was an entirely different story. A sled or toboggan (for those brave enough) launched down that upper hill towards the bear mound had absolutely no impediments (assuming your aim was good enough to not hit one of the opposing trees). I know everything seems smaller as you get older, but the way I remember that hill, it was as formidable as any 70-meter Olympic ski jump. And while I cannot claim that we covered the 253.5 meters of the world record ski jump distance, it certainly seemed like it was possible. The thrill of hurtling down that hill towards the bear’s back was invigorating and chilling all at once. Not unlike our Cold War drills.
Those were the days of Project Mercury and Project Gemini. I was born the same year as the launch of the X-15 project (1954), so while I was gurgling and peeing my pants the guys with the right stuff were forming and NASA itself was only formed in 1958. It was John F. Kennedy, struck by the ignominious advancement of the Soviet space program when we were trying to prove to the world that our liberal democracy was a better system than their autocratic communism, that induced congress to provide the funding to get America to the moon before the end of the decade. That was 1961 and pretty much marked the start of the Apollo Program at NASA, overlapping with both Mercury and Gemini. We were double-timing ourselves to meet our self-imposed and highly unlikely schedule. In fact, Apollo had eyes for only one objective, the moon. When researching the history of Apollo flights, I was curious about the fact that it was Apollo 11 that reached the moon. I didn’t recall the first ten missions, and that was for good reason. I can find no history of flights 1-3 and flights 4-6 were unmanned. Apollo 7 was a test flight, and then Apollo 8 went off to the moon and back, crewed by Borman, Lovell and Andres. That was in December, 1968. Think about that for a moment. Man just barely proved that they could rocket launch themselves as far away as the moon in December and then did two more test flights in March and May in preparation for the real thing in July, 1969. If that quick-paced schedule doesn’t amaze you, there is something wrong with your perception of time. That seven months, all happening while I was busy finishing my sophomore year of high school and learning how to ride a motorcycle (that certainly took me at least seven months to get to the top of that hill while Apollo was getting to the moon…and back), was an amazing moment in mankind’s history and was probably our country’s finest moment.
There were six more Apollo missions and all of them except Apollo 13 actually did land men on the moon and got back to earth with all souls intact. And yet, there have only been two movies that I’m aware of that were made about the Apollo program. There is the documentary called Apollo 11 about the obvious, and there was Apollo 13, a stylized piece of non-fiction that heralded the value of effort and human life over the mission of landing another two men on the moon. Other than Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the next most recognizable name in the NASA firmament is James Lovell, the man who commanded the one failed Apollo mission. His career spanned the Gemini and Apollo programs and he lived to tell the tales of going to the moon twice and yet never setting foot on it.
I am in awe of Jim Lovell and the way in which the astronauts, most notably James Lovell, worked the problems, kept their cool and figured out how to get up after falling and prevailing. In some ways, I hope America can be more like Apollo 13 as we get through this time of divisiveness and despair. We do not have the benefit of the space race to prod us onward and pull us together. We have a Pandemic, but that has not yet done the job and even started us in the wrong direction. It’s showing some signs of pulling us together now, but we still have at least 238,900 miles yet to go.