“Failure is not an option” is one history’s most famous quotes that was never actually spoken during an historical event. That event was the Apollo 13 moon landing mission, which did not go as planned. The very short version of what happened is that three astronauts avoided dying in space after a mechanical failure of their spacecraft, with the support of a lot of very smart people at mission control who improvised new procedures to save their lives.
I find myself floating away in space. Unlike the Apollo spacecraft, which was purpose built for going to the moon, my spacecraft was described as a moon spacecraft, but doesn’t actually work that way. Apollo had a lunar module that was capable of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mission mode that was well thought out by smart people. My spaceship has a lunar module that was claimed to do the same thing, except it cannot dock, doesn’t have landing legs, doesn’t have an engine capable of powered decent, and has an ascent stage that was never tested. Spoiler alert: the ascent stage fuel tanks are actually full of sand instead of hypergolic propellant.
Apollo 13 had Gene Kranz and many smart people on the ground working together around the clock to turn the Lunar Module into a lifeboat. My lunar module doesn’t work, so it cannot be used as a lifeboat. The people on ground I have to deal with don’t answer any question without waiting 48 hours, even though I’m floating into deep space on live TV. My flight director doesn’t even answer the phone when President Nixon calls to ask what is going on. When he does finally return the President’s calls, it’s all a bunch of feelings about how, no, we can’t fix this broken spaceship. After all, a lunar module capable of landing on the moon “was not in scope for the deliverable” even though it’s got the moon’s fucking name in it.
I’m in this spaceship, and yet I do not fear death, because I have my own line to President Nixon, and I’m being told another group is putting together a rescue mission with a new space ship, from SpaceX. I hope it gets here before I pass the point of no return.