One of the most impressive subplots of the Tom Hanks movie “Apollo 13,” a film now 30 years old if you can believe that, was the way NASA engineers literally figured out how to fit a square peg into a round hole so that the endangered astronauts had breatheable air.
Apollo 13 was the mission to the moon that got interrupted by an explosion. All three astronauts had to get into the lunar module, which was designed to land only two men on the moon. The extra man was creating too much carbon dioxide for the vehicle’s air scrubbing system to remove. But they couldn’t use the scrubbers from the command module because they were square-shaped, while those in the lunar module were cylindrical.
One of the NASA people who solved this problem was Ed Smylie, a Lincoln County native and resident of Crossville, Tenn. According to his alma mater, Mississippi State University, he led the development of the environmental control systems for the Apollo program.
Recalling the Apollo 13 air emergency, Smylie said in a Mississippi State documentary, “We had a storage list, and it lists everything on board. ... We went through the storage list and found out there was duct tape on board. If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape. 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 cannister.”
Smylie and two other people got the square peg into the round hole in time to restore normal air quality in the lunar module, and the astronauts got home safely.
Smylie, with a bachelor’s degree from State in 1952 and a master’s in 1954, both in mechanical engineering, ultimately worked at NASA headquarters and as the deputy director of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He remained involved with the space program until his final retirement in 2010.
There are two ways to look at the square peg story. It’s fair to wonder, 55 years later, why spaceship designers didn’t figure out a way to put the air scrubbing devices with the same design in each part of the spaceship. That way, in case of a serious problem, there would be easy replacement parts.
But on the much brighter side, this problem was one of many that the astronauts and NASA were able to solve in order to rescue the three men. The movie is one reason that the Apollo 13 mission, “a successful failure,” as it’s described at the end of the film, is as well known as its 1969 predecessor, Apollo 11, the truly historic event that put men on the moon for the first time. Apollo 13 is a wonderful example of the ingenuity and creativity that has powered America since its earliest days.
Robert Edwin Smylie died April 21, 2025 at the age of 95. His online obituary included this perfect quote: “One thing a Southern boy will never say is, ‘I don’t think duct tape will fix it.’ ”
