[Anonymouse]

Originally Posted by Hugh

If it should move and it doesn't, use the WD-40.

If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape.

Ah, duct tape - the saviour of Apollo 13 and The Martian! Amazing that even NASA can't improve on it!

Yes, peeps, duct tape was a standard supply item for the Apollo missions (the Shuttles, too)! NASA had a policy of documenting everything, and this served them well in summarising absolutely everything Lovell, Swigert & Haise had to hand - obviously if they didn't have it, they couldn't use it. NASA's mission simulator replicated the module in exact detail (except, obviously, for the lunar samples they would've obtained had the mission gone right, oops) - if it was in the sim, it was on 13, and if it wasn't, it wasn't. If a switch existed in the sim, you can bet that exact same switch would be on 13 and work in the exact same way. This, in part, was how they saved the mission: knowing exactly what the astronauts had/didn't have*. If it would work in the sim, it would work on 13. It did.

A "successful failure", indeed. It proved conclusively that duplicating the module exactly and documenting everything was the correct approach, expense greatly offset by safety.

A tech (I read somewhere that there was just one, the design team was a creative liberty Ron Howard took, but pretty much everything else** was spot-on, so we can forgive him) devised the solution to the recycling problem from what the guys on 13 did have, and it worked. All subsequent missions employed the exact same CO2 filters in the LM and the CM. Like Apollo 1, NASA learned from its mistakes. No more square pegs in round holes.

* Come to think of it, if they didn't have it, why bother talking about it? Oops part 2.

** Eugene Francis Kranz did not, in fact, declare "Failure is not an option". But from all accounts it was the sort of thing he would have said. We'll allow it for the sake of drama. It certainly was dramatic. Ed Harris was perfectly cast IMO.