26-05-2025
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
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