5 Management Lessons From An Apollo 13 Astronaut, Part 1: Never Panic Early

We live in a world that seems more demanding than ever these days, between living through a global pandemic, pivoting rapidly to remote or hybrid working, and managing all the changes that interconnectedness brings — for good and for bad.

It’s in hectic times like this where it’s helpful to look back to how people who are trained in facing emergencies not only experience them, but seek ways to motivate a team to overcome them. In space, one of the most famous examples is the entire team that got the Apollo 13 crew home during a few strange days in 1970.

Astronaut Fred Haise, a member of that crew, spoke with Forbes recently about his experiences in space and what that brought to his later life. The occasion was the publication of his memoir, Never Panic Early, written with Bill Moore and available now from Penguin Random House. In the coming days, we’ll share five lessons that he learned from that mission. The first one, echoing the book, is never to panic early.

Explaining the Apollo 13 scenario would take an entire book (and indeed, loads of books have been written about it — including one inspiring a Hollywood movie based on commander Jim Lovell’s account, with journalist Jeffrey Kluger.) To put what happened in very simple terms, a pre-existing and undetected fault with an oxygen tank caused a rupture in deep space as the crew’s Odyssey spacecraft was approaching the moon, on April 13, 1970.

That rupture caused problems in how the spacecraft pointed and regulated its temperature, along with communications issues. Power, already limited in space, fell to critical levels due to problems with the batteries. The crew found itself shutting down all but the most essential systems and relying on a backup lunar lander (Aquarius), along with thin clothes and body heat, to stay alive in the cold. As the crew restricted water consumption to maintain the spacecraft systems, Haise fell ill.

Yet through the effort of Apollo 13’s crew, Mission Control and a huge network of companies and contractors around the world, the crew splashed down safely after four adventurous days on April 17, 1970.

Haise credits his years of training as a pilot and as an astronaut, along with that of his crew and support team, as crucial to bringing everyone home. Dealing with emergencies, he told Forbes, “is really going to depend on your call, your makeup and your attitude.”

Quoting the 1995 Apollo 13 movie about his mission, he mentioned a moment where the lead mission controller for the shift, Eugene Kranz (played by actor Ed Harris) told his team not to make things worse by guessing. (The real-life Kranz also wrote the foreword to Haise’s book.)

“You really want to take a moment or two, in the back of your mind at least, [to see] what options and what things you might do. Then try to pick the best set of those you can use,” Haise said.

Haise has brought this attitude into many other parts of his career, and even in his personal life. We’ll be exploring in future articles where else Haise worked after NASA, but for now, we can briefly focus on a moment where one of his grandchildren was experiencing a seizure while Haise was driving the car.

He quickly pulled over to the side of the road, he recalled, and called an ambulance. Deciding where to take his granddaughter was a complex decision on its own, as they were on an interstate and the larger hospital was 80 miles back in Arizona, while they were on their way to Lake Charles, Louisiana.

All turned out well in the end, but Haise said the incident was a demonstration that all of us can be benefiting from thinking critically when a situation demands equal attention, care and rapid work. “These are all, in a way, incidents we people [receive] in various ways throughout our life,” he said.

Watch for Part 2 later this week, on simulating with what you’ve got.