When an explosion crippled Apollo 13 more than 200,000 miles from Earth, the astronauts’ survival depended on solving an impossible-looking problem with plastic bags, tape, a hose and something resembling a cardboard box…
In this Play Files post, we looked at why children rarely see a cardboard box as merely a cardboard box.
A child can turn one into a castle, car or spacecraft because they are not constrained by its official purpose. They see the material in front of them and ask: what else could this become?
At Sharky + George, we call this kind of playful, adaptive thinking Ingenuity – one of the three serious benefits of play.
In April 1970, that same kind of thinking became a matter of life and death.
Apollo 13 was intended to be the third mission to land astronauts on the Moon.
Two days after launch, an oxygen tank exploded in the spacecraft’s service module. The crew lost much of their oxygen supply, electrical power and water. The Moon landing was abandoned, and the mission instantly became an attempt to bring astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise safely back to Earth.
The lunar module, Aquarius, was designed to support two astronauts during a short visit to the Moon. It now had to serve as a lifeboat for three men for several days.
It was an extraordinary improvisation in itself: a vehicle built to land on the Moon was suddenly being used to keep a crew alive while carrying them around it and towards home.
Then the carbon dioxide began to rise…
Spacecraft remove carbon dioxide from the air using canisters containing lithium hydroxide.
The lunar module had its own supply, but not enough to support three astronauts for the unexpectedly long journey. There were more canisters in the command module, but they had been designed for a different system.
The command module’s cartridges were square, but the lunar module required round ones.
The crew therefore had the equipment needed to clean the air, but no way to connect it to the system keeping them alive. It was the most serious imaginable version of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Engineers on the ground had to devise an adapter using only materials they knew were available aboard the spacecraft. There was no opportunity to manufacture a proper component and send it up. The astronauts would have to build the solution themselves, following instructions relayed from Mission Control.
The resulting contraption used materials including plastic bags, cardboard, tape and a hose from a spacesuit.
It was certainly not elegant and it looked less like a piece of advanced space technology than something made during an afternoon of den building. But it worked.
Everything the engineers needed was already there, so the breakthrough was the ingenuity involved in temporarily ignoring what each object was supposed to be.
The team ignored the purpose of plastic bags and cardboard boxes as packaging, and the hose as part of a spacesuit, and made an imaginative leap: seeing them as components of an air filtration system.
This is a classic form of playful thinking: seeing beyond the normal functions of real objects and allowing them to be rearranged into something new.
Children do it instinctively. But adults often find it much harder, especially under pressure.
We tend to begin with procedures and previous solutions, and we ask which official tool has been designed for the job. When none exists, it can feel as though the solution does not exist either.
Playful thinking takes a radically different line: here are the things we have; what can we make them do?
It’s important to bear in mind that there was nothing frivolous about the Apollo 13 response. Hundreds of people were working under extreme pressure, and the improvised device had to be tested and explained precisely enough for exhausted astronauts to build it in space. But the engineers combined discipline with curiosity and adaptability, plus a willingness to test possibilities nobody had planned for.
Organisations often say they want ingenuity while creating conditions that discourage it.
There may be little time to experiment, a fear of looking foolish and an assumption that expertise means already knowing the correct answer. People become skilled at operating the existing machinery, but less willing to dismantle it mentally and see what else its parts might do.
Play creates room for that rearrangement and gives people permission to propose the cardboard-box solution.
Most of those ideas will not rescue a spacecraft, but when the accepted tools are no longer sufficient, the ability to see new possibilities in the materials already around us can be extraordinarily serious.
That is why Ingenuity is one of the serious benefits of play. By making room for experimentation, imagination and unfamiliar combinations, play helps organisations find answers that more conventional thinking may miss.
Read more about the serious benefits of play in our free white paper The Transformational Power of Play.
