The rocket launched on April,11, 1970, setting out to be the third lunar landing. Two and a half days (exactly 55:54:53 hours) into the mission and 210,000 miles from Earth, the #2 oxygen tank exploded, depressurization of the #1 tank followed moments later, and cabin oxygen levels plummeted. The chilling transmission from the capsule by Lovell, “Ah….Houston, we’ve had a problem” is world famous, as is the story of their heroics. The mission was “altered,” and the astronauts crawled into the lunar landing module for life support to slingshot around the moon and head back toward Earth. The story is a remarkable testament to the men on board and mission staff in Houston. In their statement following Lovell’s death, NASA said, “His calm strength under pressure helped return the crew safely to Earth and demonstrated the quick thinking and ingenuity that informed future NASA missions.”
The second event is just as ingenious. It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 60 years since July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, making them the first humans to set foot on anything in our universe other than our good old planet Earth. I was watching a story about the mission on the History Channel the other evening that retold a little anecdote about innovative thinking on the surface of the moon I hadn’t heard before. These incredible stories of innovation and ingenuity got me thinking about this fascinating capacity we have hard-wired into our cerebral circuits. I really hadn’t given it much thought before since it runs in the background of our brain and we call it up when we need to solve problems without much conscious effort. There’re hundreds of stories about how ingenuity has saved countless lives in otherwise nonsurvivable scenarios; Apollo 11 and 13 are truly dramatic examples. The stories, and the ingenuity it took to solve both of these problems, are worth repeating, since “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” would have ended in tragedy without both missions’ ingenious problem solving.
Following their last moon walk, Armstrong and Aldren were preparing the Apollo 11 lunar module (LM) to carry them back up to Mike Collins in the lunar orbiter command module when they discovered that a circuit breaker switch had broken off the instrument panel. Aldrin told the story that as they got settled for their return, he spotted something on the floor of the lunar module that “didn’t belong there…. I looked closer and got jolted a bit. Sitting in the lunar dust on the floor on my side of the cabin (the right side) lay a circuit breaker switch that had broken off the main control panel. I looked at the rows of breakers on the instrument panel and gulped even harder. The broken switch had snapped off from the ascent engine-arm circuit breaker, the one vital breaker that sent electrical power to the engine we needed to get off the surface of the moon.” Somehow, Aldrin or Armstrong must have accidentally bumped the switch in the cramped space of the LM with their big, bulky backpacks. “Regardless of how the circuit breaker switch broke off, it had to be pushed back in again for the ascent engine to ignite to get us home.” They reported the problem to Mission Control, but after a fretful night not getting much sleep, neither of the astronauts on the moon nor Houston had figured out a solution by the next morning. “After examining it more closely, I thought that if I could find something in the LM to push into the circuit, it might hold, but since it was electrical, I decided not to put my finger in, or use anything that had metal on the end.” Seeing how they were 238,855 miles from the nearest hardware store, their options were limited. Aldrin recalled, “I had a felt-tipped pen in the shoulder pocket of my suit that might do the job—at least I hoped it would.”
Houston moved the countdown up by a couple of hours in case it didn’t work and started running the checklist. When it was time to fire the ascent engine, Aldrin shoved his pen into the small opening where the circuit breaker switch arm should have been, “took a deep breath,” and pushed; sure enough, the circuit breaker held. Aldrin recalled their relief: “We were going to get off the moon, after all. To this day I still have the broken circuit breaker switch and the felt-tipped pen I used to ignite our engines.” The NASA official history recounts are just a little understated. “If the engine arm circuit breaker had remained open, Armstrong and Aldrin likely would have been stranded. This was a serious situation, enough so that on subsequent lunar modules a guard was installed over those circuit breakers to prevent a similar problem.” Agreed, it was a serious situation. Aldrin’s ingenuity saved their lives and spectacularly completed a successful mission.
So, what exactly is ingenuity and how does our brain “intuit” a solution to complex but novel problems? In simple terms, ingenuity is the ability to cogitate clever new ways of doing something, thinking “outside the box.” As the word implies, it’s the practical application of “genius.” Genius is a bit more complicated. It’s characterized as original and exceptional insight in the performance of something that “surpasses expectations, sets new standards for the future, establishes better methods of operation, or remains outside the capabilities of competitors.” The two words have the same Latin origin, genius. In ancient Rome the word was used to define a person’s guiding spirit or deity—how cool is that? Ingenuity requires all of this and more still. Our ingenuity is accomplished using abstract reasoning, creativity, knowledge, experience, and mental gaming scenarios; everything Aldrin put to such good use on the surface of the moon stuck in the LM that morning. A while back in this space I talked about imagination and quoted Albert Einstein: “Imagination is everything, it is a preview of life’s coming attractions.” Looking back at that article, I think a good way to think about ingenuity is that it’s the ultimate application of our imagination.
At the core of our ingenuity is something neuroscientists call heuristics, a series of mental trials and errors. Heuristics are a kind of problem-solving shortcut that we use to mentally scroll through our experiences and knowledge to find something that worked in the past and might adapt to our present challenge. It’s pretty unlikely Aldrin had ever confronted the circuit breaker issue before, but he had enough experience with electrical circuits and general engineering to “figure something out” and heuristics is how he did it.
There are two elements of heuristic problem solving we rely on, hierarchical reasoning and counterfactual reasoning. Hierarchical reasoning is a process of breaking down a problem into small “sub problems” starting with the big picture and narrowing it down to specifics. It’s the answer to that classic old riddle, “How do you eat and elephant? One bite at a time.” The other aspect of heuristics, counterfactual reasoning, is sort of arguing with ourselves over the pros and cons of the options we’ve envisioned. It dials in our imagination, as Einstein characterized it, to game play various scenarios, imagining what would have happened if you make a different choice, what could be good about one or what could go wrong with another. Aldrin quickly ruled out sticking a metal object into an electrical circuit in a little cabin with pure oxygen pumped into it on the surface of the moon that would likely generate a big spark, an obvious downside risk. Using his finger and getting a good electrical jolt up there also was a non-starter (in more ways than one).
While these heuristic strategies are well-known, scientists don’t know much about how the brain decides which one to use in any given situation. It probably relates to the intersection of all of those components of imagination, experience, knowledge, and “genius.”
To make the final choice from among our imagined solutions, we use something neuroscientists call “memory driven decision making.” This is mental strategy that calls up our past experiences to weigh and balance the options we have imagined in order to judge what would be the best one, the one option most adaptable to the problem. The key, and where we doubt and second-guess ourselves, depends on how reliable we think our memory is about those past events. Here it’s necessary to make an “educated guess” to maximize imagination using our intelligence. We have to decide that, even if a previous scenario wasn’t exactly the same, are the old solutions close enough to apply to the current conundrum? Aldrin “mentally” tried out multiple solutions—his finger, something metal—and played the scenarios out to the end, weighing each possible outcome. After all of that he chose the felt pen for all the reasons he said.
The key to heuristic problem solving is having a good imagination but not limiting your options that will compromise you from weighing other possibilities. That lets you solve your problem by game playing out as many options as you have time for before narrowing your decision down to your final choice. This model of ingenuity brings up another fascinating question. How does human ingenuity compare to artificial intelligence, since AI can scour the internet for the entirety of human experience with a problem in a few seconds and provide an unlimited number of possible solutions? AI is dominating the headlines these days and it’s a rich topic for discussion, but it will have to wait until next month. If any of you have some thoughts on the matter, or tales of an ingenious solution you’ve come up with in a pinch, send them in and I’ll work your ideas into the piece next month.
Until then, remember one of the principles of safety in the cockpit is to gather all the information available about your mission in advance to “pre-populate” your heuristic problem-solving options that you might need to scroll through in a pinch. It’s a long list that includes everything about your airplane, route, weather, landing conditions, and designated airport backup alternates. It’s not just good advice; it’s mandated in the FAR Chapter One § 91.103 “Preflight Action,” and that rule certainly makes a lot of sense seeing how we use heuristic methods to solve problems. Don’t limit your options, like an unscripted slingshot around the back of the moon or your own “felt pen,” and as always, FLY SAFE!
