From the Seattle Times, “Robert “Ed” Smylie, the NASA official who led a team of engineers that cobbled together an apparatus made of cardboard, plastic bags and duct tape that saved the Apollo 13 crew in 1970 after an explosion crippled the spacecraft as it sped toward the moon, died April 21 in Crossville, Tennessee. He was 95.“
Smylie was relaxing at home in Houston on the evening of April 13 when Lovell radioed mission control with his famous (and frequently misquoted) line: “Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
An oxygen tank exploded, crippling the spacecraft’s command module. The astronauts were retreating to the lunar excursion module, which was supposed to shuttle two crew members to the moon. Smylie knew there was a problem with this plan: The lunar module was equipped to safely handle air flow for only two astronauts. Three humans would generate lethal levels of carbon dioxide.
To survive, the astronauts would need to somehow refresh the canisters of lithium hydroxide that would absorb the poisonous gases in the lunar excursion module. There were extra canisters in the command module, but they were square; the lunar module ones were round.
“You can’t put a square peg in a round hole, and that’s what we had,” Smylie said in the documentary “XIII” (2021). He and about 60 other engineers had less than two days to invent a solution.
Using a list of materials already aboard the lunar module, Smylie and his team patched together a filter made of cardboard, plastic tubing from suits and duct tape. Instructions were given to the astronauts who built the filter; it worked, allowing the three men to return home safely.
“If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape,” Smylie said in the documentary “XIII” “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.” ( ST)
Smylie always played down his ingenuity and his role in saving the Apollo 13 crew. It was pretty straightforward, even though we got a lot of publicity for it and Nixon even mentioned our names,” he said in the oral history. “I said a mechanical engineering sophomore in college could have come up with it.”
