My Reaction to the Movie, Apollo 13

Apollo 13

This was the first time I have seen Apollo 13, despite the fact that I had heard so many great things about it. After having some time to think about it, I can honestly say I took a lot of things out of it. Each of the four astronauts singled out by the film, Lovell, Haise, Mattingly and Swigart, all responded the many challenges appropriately. Mattingly in particular had a special challenge that he was left behind by his fellow crew members because there was a chance that he could have had the measles. At first he took it very hard and almost resented his fellow crew members for their ability to go to the moon. However, once he found out the precarious situation that his crew had gotten into, he took the appropriate steps and went above and beyond his call to duty by refusing to accept anything but success in his simulation runs. This kind of relates, on a much smaller and less meaningful scale, to my groups dedication to making our model to work. We spent more time then any other group in our period on perfecting our model, spending more then an hour after school doing this, until we had finally gotten it right, just like Mattingly’s refusal to give up. Now on a more technical level, our group could also identify with the struggles of the engineers of Apollo 13 because not only did we test our models, we were also the ones who engineered the models to work. Specifically I could see similarities between our model 4 and the many problems we ran into with it along the way. We had to constantly improvise and improve the model, just with the supplies we had available, kind of like how the engineers had to find ways to find power or lower CO2 levels, just with what’s on board. The interactions between the engineers was act...

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...cause of a known and accepted problem (the foam that broke off had caused minor damage before), while the Challenger was the result of a failed part of the shuttle, much like the Apollo 13. The Apollo 13 was an internal failure that occurred during the flight so it was not as catastrophic as the external breaking of the Challenger, thankfully. I think we should still invest in space programs because of the danger we have already put on our Earth and the fact that eventually the space program might lead to successfully moving to another other celestial bodies like Mars should cease with humans until we have explored every facet of the Earth. Nothing in space (that we can travel to) is quite as interesting as the deep ocean crevices we have not explored, because there is actually life down there that might help in explaining how life can survive extreme conditions.