Latest news with #EdSmylie
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Ed Smylie, Nasa engineer whose quick thinking saved the lives of the Apollo 13 crew
Ed Smylie, who has died aged 95, was an American engineer who led the team at Nasa which saved the imperiled crew of the crippled US moon ship Apollo 13 from suffocating in their own exhaled carbon dioxide. With typical Nasa engineers' disdain for superstition, Apollo 13 was launched from Florida on April 11 1970 at 13:13 hours (Mission Control, Houston time). It planned to make America's third lunar landing, in the undulating highlands at Fra Mauro crater, amid increasing public apathy about the space programme. Two days later, on the evening of April 13, as they were closing a live television broadcast an oxygen tank exploded with a loud bang and disabled their craft. The shaken crew radioed home the legendary understatement usually misquoted as: 'Houston, we have a problem.' The moon landing was abandoned, and the crew of James Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise manually navigated around the Moon on to a course back to Earth. Their primary spacecraft, the command module, was no longer viable, but the lunar lander was available to provide limited power and propulsion. Had it not still been attached the crew would have been doomed. Remaining oxygen supplies were adequate, but a few hours later Smylie and his team suddenly realised that another issue would soon become critical for survival – carbon dioxide. Exhaled in the crew's breath, this gas has to be filtered from the cabin atmosphere by lithium hydroxide canisters. High concentrations cause confusion, reduced brain function, loss of consciousness and eventually death by asphyxiation. There were plenty of square canisters in the now powered-down command module, built by North American Aviation, but they were not compatible with the cylindrical ones in the lander, built by Grumman. The need to swap them over had never been envisaged. Smylie and two colleagues worked through the night to devise a method to make the command module's canister fit the lander's receptacle. First, he asked for a list of miscellaneous items aboard Apollo 13, the only things the astronauts had available with which to cobble together something that might work. When he saw duct tape on the list, Smylie breathed a sigh of relief: 'I felt like we were home free. One thing a southern boy will never say is: 'I don't think duct tape will fix it'.' The final contraption also involved a sock, the flight plan binder, hoses from their space suits and a plastic bag. After testing at Mission Control, assembly instructions were radioed up to the bemused crew. When they switched it on, carbon dioxide levels began dropping immediately. It was the ultimate solution for fitting a square peg into a round hole. In a memorable scene from the 1995 film Apollo 13, a character based on Smylie empties a box of duct tape, plastic bags, hoses and other items on to a table, then holds up the Command Module's square canister and the lander's round one. 'We've got to make this fit into the hole made for this,' he says, then gestures toward the pile of junk, 'using nothing but this.' Smylie was later described by Time magazine as an 'improvisational genius'. Robert Edwin Smylie was born on December 25 1929 to Robert Smylie and Leona, née White, at his grandparents' farm in Mississippi; his father managed an ice-making plant. After service in the US Navy he took bachelors and masters degrees in mechanical engineering at Mississippi State University and later earned a masters in management from MIT. After a period with Douglas Aircraft, he joined Nasa in 1962 as head of life systems, then became head of the environmental control systems branch at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. He rose to chief of crew systems division, his role during the Apollo 13 emergency. He later assumed more senior posts at Nasa headquarters in Washington. For his service to the space programme, particularly his role in saving the Apollo 13 crew, Smylie and his team received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Richard Nixon. Ed Smylie married June Reeves in 1954. They had two daughters and a son but divorced; his second wife, of 41 years, Carolyn Hall, died in 2024. His children survive him along with two stepchildren. Ed Smylie, born December 25 1929, died April 21 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Economist
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Economist
Vietnam's last best chance to get rich
The country's leader is in a mad rush to transform his country into an upper-middle-income powerhouse before geopolitical forces stall its rise. America's army is being thinned out; we examine the risks of putting both weapons and generals on the chopping block (10:12). And remembering Ed Smylie, who saved the crew of Apollo 13 with a delightfully low-tech plan (17:47). Runtime: 24 min
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA engineer Ed Smylie, who led carbon dioxide fix on Apollo 13, dies at 95
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. It was about one in the morning, four hours after an explosion tore through the Apollo 13 spacecraft on its way to the moon, when Ed Smylie realized they had to do something about the carbon dioxide. What happened next is now storied space history, involving how to fit a square peg into a round hole. Smylie, who was chief of NASA's crew systems division at the time, died on April 21, 2025, at the age of 95. His death came almost 55 years to the day after he and his team figured out how to combine a spacesuit hose, a sock, a plastic bag, cue cards and duct tape to clean the air for astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert during their emergency trip back to Earth. "I guess that was our 15 minutes of fame," said Smylie in a 1999 interview with a NASA historian. "If you read the book and look at the movie ["Apollo 13"], it sounds like I did all of that. I went back and looked at the list of people that I identified were involved, and there was probably 60 people involved in one way or another." The concern was that the carbon dioxide being exhaled by the astronauts would reach high enough concentrations to be deadly if not cleaned from the air. Related: Apollo 13: Facts about NASA's near-disaster moon mission The Apollo spacecraft had two areas where the crew lived, and each was built by different contractors. Inside the command module, the carbon dioxide scrubber (or lithium hydroxide canister, as it was technically known) was cube-shaped. In the lunar module, which on Apollo 13 served as the crew's lifeboat, the scrubber was cylindrical. Initially, Smylie thought that the solution could be as simple as continuing to run the scrubbers in the command module and run hoses to redirect their cleaned air exhaust into the lunar module. That would have worked, had the command module not needed to be shut down to reserve power for the reentry into the atmosphere (only the command module was designed to return to Earth intact). After working with others to come up with the basic concept, Smylie and his team needed to make sure that it would work. "I called both Downey and Kennedy [Space Center] and asked for some canisters to be sent so we could test that," said Smylie, referencing the location of North American Rockwell, NASA's contractor for the command module. "We found them at the Cape, chartered an airplane — Grumman [NASA's contractor for the lunar module] chartered an airplane, I guess, or North American did, and flew them up, and we had them that afternoon." After learning that their makeshift fix worked as intended, they needed to come up with how to tell the Apollo 13 crew how to build the so-called "mail box" in space. "We got hold of T.K.," said Smylie, referring to Thomas "Ken" Mattingly, who until three days before the mission had been assigned to fly with Lovell and Haise, but was grounded after he was exposed to the German measles. "T.K. was busy doing other things, and he assigned [fellow astronaut] Tony England to work with us on developing procedures to send up to the crew on how to build this thing." Although the jury-rigged solution sounded complex, Smylie said that it was "pretty straightforward." "Even though we got a lot of publicity for it and [President Richard] Nixon even mentioned our names, I always argued that that was because that was one [problem] you could understand. Nobody really understood the hard things they were doing. Everybody could understand a filter," he said. Related stories: — Apollo 13 timeline: The hectic days of NASA's 'successful failure' to the moon — The Apollo Program: How NASA sent astronauts to the moon — 'Apollo 13: Survival:' Director Peter Middleton on his immersive new Netflix documentary (exclusive) Robert Edwin "Ed" Smylie was born on Dec. 25, 1929, on his grandparents' farm in Lincoln County, Mississippi. He served in the Navy before attending Mississippi State University, where he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering in 1952 and 1956, respectively. A year later, he received his master's in management from MIT. He was hired as an engineer by the Douglas Aircraft Company (today, Boeing), working on the DC-8 jetliner, as well as how to air condition supersonic transports and keep thermal control for the Skybolt missile. He joined NASA in 1962 as the head of the life systems section and then head of the environmental control systems branch at the Manned Spacecraft Center (today, Johnson Space Center) in Houston. For more than a decade beginning in 1962, Smylie served as assistant chief for Apollo support, acting chief and then chief of the crew systems division. In 1973, he moved to Washington, D.C., where at NASA Headquarters he was the deputy associate administrator for aeronautics and space technology, followed by acting associate administrator and then associate administrator for space tracking and data systems. Smylie concluded his 18 years with NASA as deputy director and acting director of the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. After leaving NASA, Smylie held executive positions with RCA, General Electric, Grumman and the Mitre Corporation. For his service to the space program, and in particular his role in saving the Apollo 13 crew, Smylie was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and GlobalSpec's Great Moments in Engineering Award. He was also presented with the NASA exceptional service medal, distinguished service medal and outstanding leadership medal. Smylie was preceded in death by his wife of 41 years, Carolyn, his brother John, a stepson and his former wife, June. He is survived by three children, Carolyn's two children, 12 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. Follow on Facebook and on X at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
