Ed Smylie, who saved Apollo 13 crew with duct tape, dies at 95
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
Soft-spoken, with an accent that revealed his Mississippi upbringing, Smylie was relaxing at home in Houston on the evening of April 13 when Lovell radioed mission control with his famous (and frequently misquoted) line: 'Uh, Houston, we've had a problem.'
Advertisement
An oxygen tank had exploded, crippling the spacecraft's command module.
Smylie, who lived five houses down from Haise, saw the news on television and called the crew systems office, according to the 1994 book 'Lost Moon' by Lovell and journalist Jeffrey Kluger. The desk operator said the astronauts were retreating to the lunar excursion module, which was supposed to shuttle two crew members to the moon.
'I'm coming in,' Smylie said.
Advertisement
NASA official Donald K. 'Deke' Slayton showed other NASA officials the apparatus that Robert 'Ed' Smylie and a team of engineers created for the Apollo 13 rescue effort.
NASA/NYT
Smylie knew there was a problem with this plan: The lunar module was equipped to safely handle air flow for only two astronauts. Three humans would generate lethal levels of carbon dioxide.
To survive, the astronauts would need to somehow 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,' Smylie said in the documentary 'XIII' (2021).
He and about 60 other engineers had less than two days to invent a solution using materials already onboard the spacecraft.
The crisis is depicted in Ron Howard's 1995 blockbuster film, 'Apollo 13,' starring Tom Hanks as Lovell, Kevin Bacon as Swigert and Bill Paxton as Haise.
Onscreen, a character inspired by Smylie dramatically dumps rubber tubes, garment bags, duct tape and other materials onto a table. 'The people upstairs handed us this one,' the character says, 'and we gotta come through.'
In reality, the engineers printed a supply list of the equipment that was onboard.
Smylie with a command module used during the Apollo space missions.
MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY/NYT
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,' Smylie said in the documentary. '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 canister.'
Advertisement
Mission control commanders provided step-by-step instructions to the astronauts for locating materials and building the adapter. In between steps, they joked about taxes. (It was, after all, April.)
'OK, Jack,' one of the commanders radioed. 'Did anybody ever tell you that you got a 60-day extension on your income tax? Over.'
'Yes,' Swigert replied. 'I think somebody said that when you are out of your country, you get a 60-day extension.'
The adapter worked. The astronauts were able to breathe safely in the lunar module for two days as they awaited the appropriate trajectory to fly the hobbled command module home. They landed in the Pacific Ocean with plenty of time to file their taxes (thanks to the extension).
'We would have died had their solution not worked,' Haise said in an interview. 'I don't know what more you can say about that.'
Robert Edwin Smylie, who was known as Ed all his life, was born on Dec. 25, 1929, in Lincoln County, Mississippi, on his grandfather's farm. His father, Robert Torrey Smylie, delivered ice and later managed an ice-making facility. His mother, Leona (White) Smylie, oversaw the home.
After serving in the U.S. Navy, Smylie studied mechanical engineering at Mississippi State University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1952 and a master's in 1956. He pursued a doctorate at UCLA but didn't finish.
In 1962, he was working at Douglas Aircraft Co. in California when President John F. Kennedy announced plans to send astronauts to the moon.
'I was a young engineer and just wanted to be there and help make it happen,' Smylie said in a NASA oral history.
He applied for a job at the space agency in Houston, initially working in the environmental control section. He eventually became chief of the crew systems division, which was responsible for the life-sustaining equipment used by Apollo astronauts in space.
Advertisement
Smylie always played down his ingenuity and his role in saving the Apollo 13 crew.
'It was pretty straightforward, even though we got a lot of publicity for it and Nixon even mentioned our names,' he said in the oral history. 'I said a mechanical engineering sophomore in college could have come up with it.'
Smylie's marriage to June Reeves in 1954 ended in divorce. He married Carolyn Hall in 1983; she died in 2024.
In addition to Steven, his son, he is survived by his daughters, Susan Smylie and Lisa Willis; stepchildren Natalie and Andrew Hall; 12 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.
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 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.'
This article originally appeared in
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
12 minutes ago
- The Hill
Rare ‘Black Moon' to rise this week: What to know about the phenomenon
(NEXSTAR) – Just a few weeks after twin meteor showers passed overhead, there's another astronomical phenomenon set to occur – a 'Black Moon.' Rising Aug. 23, the Black Moon won't be as eye-catching as other celestial events this month – in fact you won't be able to see the moon at all – but its rarity makes it fascinating, according to While not an official astronomical term, Black Moon is used to describe 'unusual timings of new moon phases.' To understand it better, it may help to think about the Blue Moon, of 'Once in a Blue Moon' fame. The phrase references the rare 'extra' full moon that happens every two-and-a-half years, according to NASA. Because the moon's cycle is 29.5 days, slightly less than the average month, eventually a full moon will fall on the first or second day of the month, allowing for another full moon to occur just before the month ends. Conversely, a Black Moon refers to the new moon phase, or as NASA puts it 'the invisible phase' when the moon rises with the sun, but is positioned between Earth and the sun. The illuminated side of the moon is opposite Earth, making it impossible to see. A Black Moon also happens due to the gap between the lunar cycle and the average length of the calendar month, with the term being used for the third of four new moons in a season, according to Weather Network meteorologist Scott Sutherland. August 23 marks the third new moon of the 2025 summer season, with the fourth falling on Sept. 21, according to Alternatively, a Black Moon can also mean the second new moon in a single calendar month, a phenomenon that won't happen again until Aug. 31, 2027. For anyone still underwhelmed by the upcoming Black Moon, keep in mind that a new moon also brings the darkest night sky and best chance to star gaze.
The Verge
13 minutes ago
- The Verge
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has found a new moon orbiting Uranus.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has found a new moon orbiting Uranus. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) hasn't given it a name yet, but NASA has announced that astronomers discovered a new moon orbiting Uranus using images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope's near-infrared camera last February. Currently designated S/2025 U1, the tiny moon's estimated to be around six miles in diameter which is potentially why it wasn't previously spotted by Voyager 2 or other telescopes. It's located about 35,000 miles from the center of Uranus in an orbit between Ophelia and Bianca.
Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
A new moon discovered orbiting Uranus is so small, you could walk it in two hours
Roll out the cosmic welcome mat for our solar system's newest resident: a never-before-seen moon orbiting Uranus. A team of astronomers announced Tuesday that a new satellite measuring roughly 90 football fields across was discovered around the seventh planet from the sun. The moon, which was first seen by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope on Feb. 2, joins a busy neighborhood of 28 other known moons around Uranus. The Webb telescope's observations of Uranus are giving scientists better insight into one of the more mysterious planets in our solar system. 'No other planet has as many small inner moons as Uranus,' Matthew Tiscareno, a member of the research team and a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute in California, said in a statement. Tiscareno said the 'complex inter-relationships' between Uranus' moons and its faint rings suggest the planet's evolutionary history may have been a chaotic one. 'Moreover, the new moon is smaller and much fainter than the smallest of the previously known inner moons, making it likely that even more complexity remains to be discovered,' he said in the statement. The newfound satellite is about 35,000 miles from the center of the planet, with a near circular orbit, according to the researchers. It's only about 6 miles across — a distance that can be walked in about two hours at a brisk pace — but follow-up observations are needed to confirm the moon's size and other characteristics. The discovery has also not yet been peer-reviewed. Uranus has five large, outer moons named Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon. The newly discovered moon is inside the orbits of the five larger moons, the researchers said. All of Uranus' moons are named after characters from the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, according to NASA. The new moon does not yet have a name, though any designation will eventually need to be approved by the International Astronomical Union, which oversees the official naming process for astronomical objects. 'It's a small moon but a significant discovery, which is something that even NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft didn't see during its flyby nearly 40 years ago,' Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist in the Southwest Research Institute's Solar System Science and Exploration Division, said in a statement. In 1986, the Voyager 2 probe became the first human-made object to fly past Uranus, giving humanity its first close-up views of the distant planet. The historic encounter yielded more than 7,000 photographs of Uranus and helped scientists discover two new rings and 11 new moons around the planet. The newest moon's tiny size likely made it too small for Voyager 2's cameras to see, but the Webb telescope's high-resolution instruments may shed more light on the planet and its system. 'Looking forward, the discovery of this moon underscores how modern astronomy continues to build upon the legacy of missions like Voyager 2,' El Moutamid said in the statement. 'Now, nearly four decades later, the James Webb Space Telescope is pushing that frontier even farther.' This article was originally published on Solve the daily Crossword
