In Memory of Ed Smylie, Whose Famous Hack Saved the Apollo 13 Crew
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Summary
On its Hackaday blog, engineer Ed Smylie has been honoured for his efforts in keeping Apollo 13 astronauts alive during their 1970 space mission, which saw him devise a vital adaptor using plastic bags and duct tape.
The ingenuity of Ed Smylie has been celebrated in both the New York Times and in an article on the Hackaday website following his death on 21 April.
Smylie, who was 95, had worked on the space mission which required filtering the air for three astronauts using spare parts from the command module, but the canisters were the wrong shape.
With resources on board the spacecraft, he produced an adapter to enable the square peg to fit in a round hole, thus extending the astronauts’ survival until the crew could return to Earth.
This narrative was depicted in the 1995 film Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Ed Harris.
