Houston, we have a problem

Why a modern-day Apollo 13 would probably not make it back to earth

Last week I watched a Netflix documentary on the Apollo 13 drama in space and how, against all odds, the three astronauts Lovell, Haise and Swigert managed to make it safely back to earth. It’s a fair bet that if a similar disaster were to befall a modern-day spaceship and crew, the outcome might be very different.

The reason is that such a dramatic rescue was the result of improvisation, creativity and experimentation by people who grew up in a mechanical age.

Children learned how to use their hands. They had the freedom to play outdoors and experiment, without parental fear that they might come to harm. Building stuff, from push-carts to kites, was par for the course. They took apart and repaired clocks, toasters and radios. By the time they were in their early teens, most boys (though not girls; these were the days of gender roles) were at ease with basic car maintenance. Indeed, if you didn’t know how to change a tyre by the time you left school, you were really a wimp!

Fast forward to today’s internet age, and childhood has radically changed. Street-smart has given way to screen-smart. Unsupervised outdoor play and experimentation have been curtailed through over-protective parenting. Children usually have an adult in the line of sight, are not allowed to take risks and are shielded from all types of danger – real, perceived or improbable.

They might have all of the digital skills necessary to become NASA engineers, but if they never grow up learning how to experiment and use their hands, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll ever be able to come up with the type of solutions that saved the lives of the Apollo 13 crew.

Exaggeration? Hardly. In her book, How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success, Julie Lythcott-Haims refers to a 2008 TED talk by Dr Stuart Brown, in which he explains that “employers such as Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA and Boeing won’t hire a research and development problem-solver – even if the person is a top graduate from one of the top engineering schools – unless that person did stuff with their hands early in life”.

This makes sense. Mechanical smarts and knowing how to use one’s hands is not something that can be bolted on later on in life. Rather, it´s part of you as you grow up, like learning how to talk.

However, tinkering around and taking stuff apart in the internet age is easier said than done. Yesterday’s products were made out of everyday materials that people could work with (metal, wood, glass and leather) and used components that people could understand (springs, gears, nuts and bolts). These have given way to consumer devices and appliances with complex electronics hidden behind inaccessible plastic casings. Even if you did manage to get one open, you’d have zero chance of understanding the role of the microchip, let alone being able to fix it.

A personal anecdote illustrates just how far modern children grow up without learning to use their hands. My children grew up in the 1990s and the early 2000s – fortunately with lots of unsupervised outdoor play, just like me. And yet, apart from Legos and helping Dad to assemble furniture from Ikea, there wasn’t much mechanical for them to tinker around with. One day I changed the tyre on our car, and I’ll always remember how surprised they were that I was able to do that (“Wow, Dad, you mean you know how to change a tyre!”)! They found it quite fascinating, and I got them to participate and learn how to use a jack and a wheel-brace.

So, if one day Elon Musk ever does get a crew on its way to Mars, we’d all better hope nothing goes wrong on board, because NASA engineers would probably not have the improvisational skills to be able to fix things the way they did for Apollo 13.

Michael Gentle is the author of Life Before the Internet, a fascinating look back at a slower, simpler time, when Amazon was just a river. For similar articles, click here.

Image from NASA

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