Apollo 1 was meant to be the first in a series of manned spaceflights that would ultimately lead to a moon landing. It was designed to test the Command/Service Module and it was scheduled to launch on February 21, 1967. But it never made the launch because of a deadly cabin fire during a rehearsal conducted by the flight controllers and the three-man crew of Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. The fire was sudden and moved rapidly—all three men were lost in less than thirty seconds. Even though outside technicians raced to open the hatch, they were too late—they had run out of time. A subsequent investigation revealed several risky design features of the module, not the least of which were a dangerous atmosphere of pure oxygen and a hatch door that was difficult to open when the cabin was pressurized. This thorough investigation resulted in several engineering modifications including a hatch door that was easier to open and the addition of nitrogen to the atmosphere, which made it much less likely that combustible material would ignite. The cause of the spark and the initial material to ignite remain unknown.
The missions continued and on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 made the first successful lunar landing. The crew members all returned safely. They were Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. Apollo 13 was launched on April 11, 1970—the crew members were James Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise. About two days into the mission an oxygen tank ruptured on the Command Module and caused substantial damage. The entire mission, including the lives of the crew, were in jeopardy. Heroic efforts by ground support teams succeeded in bringing all three men safely home. But it was a very close call.
Gene Kranz worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from 1960 to 1994. He served as Deputy Flight Director on Apollo 1 and Lead Flight Director on Apollo 13. In his autobiography, Failure is not an Option, Kranz discussed an important difference between these two events. In the case of Apollo 1, he stressed that rescuers did not have enough time to react to the danger. However, in the case of Apollo 13, there was a window of time that offered some slight chance that the astronauts could be saved. There was no guarantee, but there was a chance.
He then described the process followed by NASA personnel and contractors as they identified the critical problems and devised procedures and “workarounds” to solve them. These ground-based engineers and technicians drew on a wide range of skills to formulate ideas and turn them into action plans which were then “voiced” to the astronauts to be carried out at the proper time and in the proper sequence. The more one digs into the work performed by these men and women, the more one can see the hallmarks of evolution by intellection. The astronauts of Apollo 13 were saved by the sustained, cooperative, and rational acts of people who had developed over many years the skills and knowledge that they could translate into a human-made miracle.
Today, we cannot say that our world is like Apollo 1. Our world was successfully launched, and has worked well for a very long time—Apollo 1 failed to launch. Our world is not like Apollo 11, because our world is still on its mission and must continue to fly through space for millions of human generations. Our world is most like Apollo 13. We have had a successful launch and we have enjoyed a few millennia of smooth flight, but suddenly our life support system has been damaged and there is only a small window of time in which we must make in-flight corrections or our life support system will be unable to do its job and catastrophe will be sudden, fast-moving, and deadly. We will be like Apollo 1.
So, the question is this: Do we want be like Apollo 1, or be like Apollo 13? These choices are real and cannot be avoided. If we choose to be like Apollo 13, and make in-flight changes with the personnel and resources we have on board, we can still repair our spaceship. But if we do nothing our life support system will continue to degrade and all hands on board will be lost. I vote to be like Apollo 13. I believe that Spaceship Earth, and all the people in it, are worth saving,
One difference between our present situation and the situations described above is that we do not seem to be concerned with the threat of global warming. The Apollo astronauts and their ground support teams were acutely aware of the dangers posed by the hazards of fire, or by high concentrations of carbon dioxide—those men and women were quick to respond to the dangers, while we do nothing except make matters worse. If we dig up and burn all of the fossil fuels that we now know are in the ground, we will destroy our way of life—in other words if we do not eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels by 2050 we will destroy our civilization.
But we still have NASA scientists, technicians, and engineers who have the skills and knowledge that can help save us from ourselves. There are thousands of other men and women all over the world who can help us survive. There are millions of others who can be trained to do the work needed to restore our planet to the friendly place it once was. But none of these people have the power to take action. They cannot command the money and other natural resources that are needed. The power to save Earth rests in our hands—I mean in your hands and in mine. We must rely on evolution by intellection to organize, plan, fund, train, and deploy the human and natural resources needed to carry out the largest human project ever—and the most important. We must go to work today—and even then we may be too late. We earthlings, we astronauts, may have already run out of time.