Vignettes from Apollo 13 Related to Decision Making

Here are more Apollo 13 vignettes that didn't make the cut for Stand Back and Deliver.

Less than two days into the flight of Apollo 13, the crew experiences a major malfunction in the service module. Mission control quickly assesses the situation and realizes that their purpose has changed. No longer are they focused on landing two of the astronauts on the moon, they are now solely focused on getting all three astronauts safely back to earth. That also means that there is a lot of activities originally planned for this mission that they were simply no longer going to do. This was dramatized particularly well in the movie Apollo 13 when Ed Harris playing Gene Krantz, one of the flight directors, tosses the flight plan aside, “I want you all to forget the flight plan. From this moment on, we are improvising a new mission.” The team then proceeded to discuss what they were and were not going to do. Most of the activities surrounded the bare minimum activities to get the astronauts safely home. The level of activity was also restricted through a consideration of what risks they faced, for example choosing to sling shot around the moon in a “free return trajectory” instead of firing up the main service module engine to immediately turn around because the did not know if the service module engine would work. They also had to make a series of assumptions based on the actual capabilities of the spacecraft, paying attention to what it was designed to do, but realizing they had to test it’s limits. And finally, they weighed the various constraints on resources and time that faced the astronauts to decide what activities the astronauts could and should do.

During the Apollo 13 mission, the Mission Control faced the when do we do things decision point several times. Once it was realized that the spacecraft had been damaged, the normal flight plan, which in itself was a prioritized list of activities, gave way to a new list of activities. The first thing to do was get the crew to safety within the spacecraft itself. With the available oxygen and power quickly disappearing in the command module, the crew had to move themselves into the lunar module to use it as a lifeboat. Next activity, get the crew on the appropriate trajectory to return home. After that, Mission Control had to work out a means for using the lithium hydroxide filters from the command module in the lunar module, a classic square peg in a round hole problem. Throughout the mission, Mission Control and the crew kept a keen eye on all of the activities that needed to be done and quickly determined the priority of each, with an obvious understanding that it did no good to get the spacecraft back to earth if there was not enough oxygen, water, or power, or too much Carbon Dioxide to keep the crew alive.

Teams will often utilize a value model without realizing it. Gene Krantz and the rest of the ground crew and astronauts for the Apollo 13 mission gave little thought to the concept of a Value Model, but they were in fact utilizing one. They started out with the purpose of landing men on the moon. With some pretty substantial costs, some soft benefits of reinforcing the United States’ domination of space and the opportunity to do additional exploration of the moon’s surface. Then the considerations changed, which changed the value they sought from the mission, and thereby changed the decisions that they made.

Your teams most likely do not have the life and death consequences or the public exposure experience by the Apollo 13 mission, but they can still utilize this model to make informed decisions about the right things to do and when to do them.

The close alignment of the Apollo program’s purpose to the country’s strategy at the time was a key to it’s success in the face of so many odds. To see what happens when that compelling tie between purpose and strategy disappears one only has to look at the space program since those heady days in 1969 and 1970. Starting with the end of the Apollo program, once the USSR had been beaten, landing on the moon became almost routine, people began to loose interest, and the value derived from such missions began to fade. In fact the last couple of missions of a program designed, at least subconsciously, to beat the Soviet Union to the moon ended up cooperating them in joint space missions that added no real value other than to point out that the two countries could actually cooperate on something if they set their mind to it.

The shuttle program has proven unable to capture the imagination of the American public, or perhaps more importantly, Congress. The program started out seeking a way to provide reliable, convenient, regular trips to space using a reusable spacecraft. But when the realities of the program hit and NASA found that the shuttle could not economically provide regular or reliable trips to space, other purposes were sought out for the shuttle. Much in the way that some projects come about as solutions looking for problems, the shuttle was bounced from one possible use to another, until recently when NASA made the decision to seek the moon and mars again, and to ride the horse that brought them here

As the comparison between the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs shows, purpose alignment plays an important role in deciding whether an activity is worth pursuing.

Thinking back to the Apollo 13 mission again, the mission controllers and astronauts were facing some definite considerations when it came to making decisions about the actions to take in the mission. The mission itself, even before the oxygen tank explosion, was inherently risky given the extreme environment of space thru which the crew was flying. They also faced some very clear constraints in the form of oxygen, potable water, power, physical space, and materials with which to operate. They also had to factor in several assumptions that were made designing the Apollo craft, and had to make additional assumptions as plans were developed to bring the astronauts safely home.

Perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of the Apollo 13 mission is how these considerations changed throughout the mission. The risks that were present and known at the beginning of the mission were different, some having come to fruition, and new ones being discovered as a result of the events of the mission. The astronauts faced a risk of electrocution when trying to power up the command module because of all the condensation that occurred in the module while it was powered down for several days. The constraints placed on the astronauts changed dramatically when Oxygen Tank #2 exploded a couple of days into the mission. They no longer had sufficient power to stay in the command module, they were restricted to drinking 5oz of water a day, and they were limited to roughly 12 amps of power for most of the trip back from the moon, which is less power than what a typical household vacuum uses. All of these changes impacted the decision making process of the ground crew and astronauts, and also impacted the idea of what was considered successful and valuable.