Fare Thee Well

Ed Smylie, who came up with the "square-peg-in-a-round-hole" solution to remove excess carbon dioxide from the Apollo 13 landing module cabin made famous in the awesome Apollo 13 movie, has died at 95:

He and about 60 other engineers had less than two days to invent a solution using materials already onboard the spacecraft. The crisis is depicted in Ron Howard’s 1995 blockbuster film, “Apollo 13,” starring Tom Hanks as Mr. Lovell, Kevin Bacon as Mr. Swigert and Bill Paxton as Mr. Haise.

Onscreen, a character inspired by Mr. Smylie dramatically dumps rubber tubes, garment bags, duct tape and other materials onto a table. “The people upstairs handed us this one,” the character says, “and we gotta come through.”

In reality, the engineers printed a supply list of the equipment that was onboard. Their ingenious solution: an adapter made of two lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module, plastic bags used for garments, cardboard from the cover of the flight plan, a spacesuit hose and a roll of gray duct tape.

“If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary. “That’s where we were. We had duct tape, and we had to tape it in a way that we could hook the environmental control system hose to the command module canister.”

The best of the absolute best of the best. And a reminder to take a minute & be grateful that John Aaron, NASA's steely-eyed missile man, is still alive on Earth with all of us.