Free NYT article here. The Red Green of the aerospace industry!
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... died on April 21 in Crossville, Tenn.
To survive, the astronauts would somehow need to 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,” Mr. Smylie said.
Their ingenious solution: an adapter made of two lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module, plastic bags used for garments, cardboard from the cover of the flight plan, a spacesuit hose and a roll of gray duct tape.
“If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape.”
...Mr. Smylie’s lifesaving invention was a seminal moment in the storied history of duct tape, the jack-of-all trades tool-kit item.
“Duct tape has come to enjoy a kind of heroic and ever more pervasive presence in American life,” Tisha Y. Hooks observed in “Duct Tape and the U.S. Social Imagination,” the dissertation she wrote at Yale University in 2015. “From the Apollo 13 mission to the broken basement pipe,” she wrote, “duct tape is there.”
