Trip to earth: was Apollo 13 Mission a failure?

The problem is not destination, but knowing where we want to go (Universal Pictures)

Confusing what you get with what you deserve can lead us to wrong conclusions. On the day of the last Christmas lottery draw, I heard on the radio a lady, who had won one of the most important prizes, say that she had worked hard to get that prize...

Failure or success are more than two words that define a situation. They are more valuable for what is learned than for what is achieved. Something like that happened with Apollo 13. It didn't complete its mission, but was it really a failure? And more importantly, what does all this have to do with entrepreneurship and startups?

Failure or success is more valuable for what is learned than for what is achieved.

Starting point: during the third manned trip to the Moon, after the Apollo 11 and 12 missions, beyond half of the outward journey (about 330,000 km from Earth), an incident in the main ship (command module) left it useless, forcing the three crew members to use the lunar module (the auxiliary ship, designed for two of them to land on the moon) as a "lifeboat", without enough fuel or oxygen to return to Earth.

“Houston, we have a new mission”

Lessons

1. Management of uncertainty. Would you act the same if they told you that you only have 15' of oxygen left? It is often said that extreme situations show our true self. In a figurative sense, the uncertainty should serve to bring out the best in each one. Market forces act in a way that sometimes (if not always) it is not in our hands to change, but as in Judo, taking advantage of the competitor’s balance, we may be able to change the dynamics.
2. Leadership. As you can hear in this audio, the calm shown by the astronauts when communicating the situation contrasts with the tone, more nervous, of the person in charge of the mission on Earth. In some situations, there is no room for doubt and you can only think about moving on, such as in obstacle courses, resting while running until you face the next hurdle.

“I don´t care what was designed to do. I care about what it can do”

3. Survival. Apollo 13 did not land on the Moon as planned, but the crew returned home safely. They did not achieve all their objectives, but they survived to continue fighting for them. In business terms, one more day to continue learning and co(o)mpiting. Surviving and accomplishing the mission are not as different things as it may seem.

4. Teamwork. The drunk bottle is one of the most popular confidence games: a person in the center of a circle has to drop down, with his eyes closed, trusting that the rest will hold him. This is how the three Apollo 13 astronauts must have felt. In fact, from Earth they found several keys, such as the handmade carbon dioxide filter to keep the lunar module habitable; that filter, on the other hand, could not have worked without… duct tape.

Which are the play for today?

5. Initiative. Some situations serve as a catalyst. Situations that require the best version of yourself. In this case, it pushed the team to develop an ability to give more than asked.

We cannot insist on adapting reality to the solutions we propose.

6. Luck. Getting vision and chance mixed up is very dangerous and it happens more than we think. In Apollo 13, we find several examples. If the incident had occurred later in the mission, there would have been no reaction time (a stroke of good bad luck). Only one astronaut had previously used the system to manually correct the angle of entry into the atmosphere, his name was Jim Lovell and he was the commander of the Apollo 13 mission. Chance is also that a liquid oxygen tank fell (without damage apparent) at the time of assembly in the ship, the same tank that would explode during the mission…In addition, some decisions are beyond one’s will: what happens when the Government contracts the ventilation system of the command module with a supplier and lunar module’s with a different one? Ultimately, unexpected events may arise while we launch a business, whether beneficial or harmful, for which we must offer a solution. Too bad we cannot adapt reality to the solutions we propose…

How to become a square filter into a round one?

7. Extracting every last drop of resources. As we saw with the duct tape, each team has to get by with the resources at its disposal. The Apollo project was not doing badly in terms of resources (153,000 million current dollars ) and the one on the 13th was the first mission that included wet food. To maximize oxygen, the crew had to ration their water intake to 1/5 of the usual amount and compensate with electrolytes they extracted from the moisture in the food packages. Although it seems a nonsense, even the project with the most exorbitant budget also feels lack of resources.

On a daily basis, we can find several Apollo 13 forced to change course.

There was not only an Apollo 13 mission. Since then, around us we can find several Apollo 13 to which a change in regulation, a new trend in the market, a disruption or an extraordinary event may cause a change of course that means taking your business plan to the blue container, having to redirect your entire team, scrap a business line and take another, etc.

"Failure is not an option" is a well-worn slogan. But, in this case, what could we have considered as failure? In the same way that we cannot consider success as black or white, between fulfilling the mission and surviving there may be a large space of gray. Furthermore, success cannot act as an alibi either. Is success the last step of Neil Armstrong or the sum of all the steps that were taken during Apollo project? As in many other situations, it is of little help to focus on going, if we do not take into account the return...

So, was the Apollo 13 mission a failure? Yes, of course. A successful failure. Maybe the most successful one.