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HUMILITY A modest or low view of one’s own importance; humbleness. OPTIMISM Hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something. OVER-DELIVER To deliver in excess of a norm, standard, or requirement. KINDNESS The quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.
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On the morning of April 26, 1986, scientists got to work on a new series of tests in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. Soon after the tests began, things started going wrong. Very wrong. Two explosions rocked through the unit. Two unfortunate engineers were killed instantly. But that was just the start of the problem. More seriously, a fire had started in the light water graphite moderator reactor. Plumes of radioactive smoke were sent into the sky. A further 49 workers quickly fell ill and died over the next few weeks – often enduring slow, agonizing deaths. The accident meant that more radioactive fallout was sent into the atmosphere than was caused by either of the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War. The damage was massive. But it could have been so much worse. A second explosion could have caused the whole Chernobyl complex to go into full meltdown. Had this happened, experts estimate that nuclear fallout would have spread over half of Western Europe, killing untold numbers as well as destroying land and food crops. Tensions between the Western world and the Soviet Union might have also deteriorated significantly. Thankfully, a second explosion was avoided, thanks to the three men who have gone down in history as ‘The Chernobyl Three’ – or, testament to their bravery, as the Chernobyl ‘Suicide Squad’. The story goes that, several weeks after the first explosion, the plant chiefs became seriously worried that radioactive material was traveling in a molten flow towards the huge pool of water under the reactor. If the two came into contact, it would have caused a second steam explosion, potentially destroying Chernobyl’s three other reactors. Someone needed to go into the pool and drain it. According to most accounts, two plant workers and one soldier stepped forward to take on the job. Undoubtedly, the plant workers – and most likely the soldier, too – would have known that the basement of the reactor was highly radioactive. Even if they could get the job done quickly, they would still be exposed to lethally high doses. In short, it was a true suicide mission, and the Soviet authorities even assured the men that their families would be looked after financially. Some historians have tried to separate myth from reality. It’s been pointed out that all the men may well have been plant workers who were just unfortunate enough to be on shift at that time rather than actively volunteering for the work. The depth of the water in the cooling pool is also disputed. But what can’t be denied is that, in darkness and in treacherous conditions, the three men put concerns of their own safety to the back of their minds and, after much trying, finally found the correct valves to open and drain the pool. Since the Soviet authorities were determined to downplay the Chernobyl “accident”, what happened to the three men is also a question of historical debate. It’s believed that none of them actually died in the immediate aftermath of their heroic actions. Even if they didn’t die of radioactive fallout – and many workers did – their heroism is by no means diminished. The three men stepped into the darkness beneath a molten radioactive core and put the good of humanity before their own safety.
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“Houston, we have a problem.” The famous quote has become a popular phrase applied to almost any situation. Those who were alive then may well remember the Apollo 13 mission as a space thriller with a happy ending. Those who have come across the story through subsequent recreations, notably Ron Howard’s 1995 film, might remember that the success of the rescue involved squaring the circle. But the adventure of Apollo 13 was much more than that. The problems cropped up one after another, followed by solutions that were thought up one after another, in a brilliant example of crisis management and teamwork. On April 11, 1970, the third of the manned missions to the lunar surface blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center with three astronauts on board: Commander James A. Lovell, Lunar Module Pilot Fred W. Haise, and Command Module Pilot John L. “Jack” Swigert, who was to remain in orbiting around the Moon while his two companions explored the lunar formation called Fra Mauro. Almost 56 hours after the launch, when the ship was about 330,000 kilometres from Earth, the crew of the Apollo 13 heard a loud bang. While reporting the problem to the control centrer—”Houston, we had a problem,” was the original phrase—the oxygen level of tank 2 dropped to nothing. ‘ODYSSEY’ MISSION Among those who heard that distress call was Jerry Woodfill, the Johnson Space Center engineer in charge of the Apollo 13 warning systems. Woodfill saw the flash of the main alarm before hearing the words of Swigert and Lovell. What followed, as the alarms began to sound one after the other before Woodfill’s eyes, led to an anguished conclusion: the mission could not be completed, and the recovery of the astronauts was going to live up to the name with which the command module of the Apollo 13 had been baptized: Odyssey. The ship en route to the Moon consisted of three parts. The Odyssey command module was the capsule—the passenger compartment for the astronauts during the voyage to the Moon and the return to Earth. This module was joined to two other devices: on its nose was the lunar module Aquarius, in which Lovell and Haise were supposed to descend to the Moon. At the opposite end, the Odyssey was attached to the service module, a non-pressurized cylindrical structure that housed the systems required by the command module and which had to be decoupled on its return, before re-entry into the atmosphere. The service module carried fuel cells made up of hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which combined to supply drinking water and power the Odyssey, in addition to providing breathable air. Following the explosion of one of the oxygen tanks and the loss of the other, the fuel cells failed, leaving the astronauts with an insufficient supply of water, energy and oxygen to complete their plan. “FAILURE WAS NOT AN OPTION” The mission had to be aborted, and as Woodfill points out to OpenMind, paraphrasing a promotional motto from Ron Howard’s film, “failure was not an option.” Three years earlier, the Apollo 1 capsule had burned on the launch pad because of an electrical fault, killing its three crewmembers. “The tragedy of Apollo 1, I believe, led to that deeply felt resolve in all who continued to work to put the first men on the Moon,” says Woodfill. But the obstacles to overcome were considerable. The mission controllers in Houston decided to maintain the spacecraft’s trajectory to return to Earth, taking advantage of the lunar gravity boost. The astronauts had to leave the Odyssey and move to the Aquarius, which had enough water, oxygen and supply batteries, provided they were rationed drastically. Soon after, the mission’s most memorable problem arose when another of Woodfill’s alarms warned that the CO2 emitted by the astronauts’ breathing was beginning to accumulate in the Aquarius at dangerous levels. Engineers in Houston were required to design an emergency procedure so that Lovell and his fellow crew members could adapt the Odyssey’s square CO2 absorbers to the circular holes of the Aquarius. “Even if every available round lunar module filter were used, the crew would not have survived without the duct taped apparatus,” says Woodfill. However, the problems did not end there. When the astronauts set out to align the ship for re-entry into the atmosphere, they discovered that the usual method was impracticable: the remnants of the explosion that traveled around them made it impossible to orient themselves by the stars, so they had to be guided by the Sun. In addition, procedures had to be improvised to transfer energy from the Aquarius batteries to the Odyssey, and then to eject the former at a prudent distance that would allow the command module to clear its re-entry route. RE-ENTERING THE ATMOSPHERE When the astronauts returned to the Odyssey —to re-enter the atmosphere and prepare for landing— the cold temperature in its interior had condensed so much water vapor in the devices that the reactivation of the energy supply could have caused a new and fatal electrical failure. “Powering up those circuits might very well have resulted in the same kind of short-circuit which led to the demise of the Apollo 1 crew,” says Woodfill. And thanks to the work of this engineer, also responsible for the wiring of the panels, at least the death of the three crew members of the first Apollo mission was not in vain: after that tragedy, Woodfill explains, not only were the alarm systems improved, but also the electrical connectors under the panels were coated with a substance that insulated them against moisture. “In my mind, this saved Apollo 13,” he says proudly. The Odyssey landed in the South Pacific on April 17, with its three occupants safe and sound. The investigation after the accident managed to unravel the cause. The liquid oxygen tanks had a heater to turn the contents into gas, controlled by a thermostat. Due to a change in the technical specifications, the power supply of these devices
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Are you a Buffalo, or a Cow? Sometimes we have to go to nature to get the best advice. In your life, when a storm hits you, do you handle it like a cow or like a buffalo? When a herd of cows sees a storm coming, they turn to each other, discuss it for a minute, and then they turn and run. They bolt away from that storm as fast as they possibly can. There is a problem with this method of handling a storm. Do cows run very fast? No, they don’t. What happens is they get caught in the storm and end up running with it, exhausted, in pain, and prolonging the time it takes for the storm to pass by trying to outrun it when it is, in fact, too late. How many of us human beings put off challenges in our life that we don’t want to do? Most people deal with their storms in life by being an ostrich with their head in the sand, or a cow running away from their problems as fast as they can. You should deal with your life’s storms like a buffalo. When a herd of buffalo sees a storm coming, they discuss it for a minute, and then they CHARGE. It’s the same storm that the cows see, the difference is, the animal’s reaction to it. By running directly into the storm, the buffalos minimize the storm’s impact and break through into the sun on the other side.
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There’s a right way to do things… In a recent issue of a magazine I never read, called Meat and Poultry, the editors quoted from another magazine I never read, Feathers, that is the publication of the California Poultry Industry. But the following story was irresistible. It seems the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has a unique way of testing the strength of windshields on airplanes. The device is a gun that launches a dead chicken right at the plane’s windshield at approximately the speed the plane flies. The theory is that if the windshield doesn’t crack from the carcass impact, it will survive a real collision with a bird during flight. Well, it seems the British were very interested in this and wanted to test a windshield on a brand new high-powered locomotive they’re developing. They borrowed the FAA’s chicken launcher, loaded the chicken, and fired. The ballistic chicken shattered the windshield, went right through the heart of the engineer’s chair, smashed the instrument panel behind him, and embedded itself in the back wall of the engine cab. The British were stunned, and asked the FAA to recheck the test to see if everything was done correctly. The FAA reviewed the test thoroughly, and had only one recommendation: thaw the chicken. There’s a right way to do things. And if you do things the wrong way, the result is chaos.
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The magnetic compass is one of our oldest and most essential navigation tools. Compasses are considered mandatory equipment for anyone venturing out into the wilderness, and considering the ramifications of getting lost without means of reorienting yourself, it’s hard to imagine why anyone wouldn’t bring one. As illustrated by these stories, possession of a compass and the ability to read it correctly can mean the difference between life and death. For every one of these, there are hundreds of thousands of stories of people trekking safely to their destinations without major incident, thanks to planning, attention to detail and proficiency with a compass and map. Retired merchant seaman Waldemar Semenov, 95, donated the compass in 2005. In 1942, Semenov, a Russian immigrant, was serving as a junior engineer on the American merchant ship SS Alcoa Guide, sailing from New Jersey to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe with a cargo of supplies and equipment for the West Indies. On the night of April 16, about 300 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, a German submarine, the U-123, surfaced and opened fire with its deck cannon. “We didn’t have any guns, and there was no escort,” Semenov recalls. “We didn’t have much speed. They used us as target practice.” In the first six months of 1942, German submarines sank 400 ships in the Atlantic. At the time, my family was living in a house on the New Jersey shore. I was only 4, but I vividly recall my father waking my older brother and me in the middle of the night, wrapping us in blankets and taking us down to the beach. He pointed to flickering lights on the horizon. “Remember this,” he said. “Those are the flames of ships torpedoed by the Germans.” The Alcoa Guide was unarmed, but its captain, Samuel Cobb, tried to ram the sub; he was easily outmaneuvered. Before long, Cobb was wounded, the ship was on fire and beginning to sink, and the crew was scrambling on deck to lower two lifeboats and a raft into the water. Semenov says he stayed calm; this was not his first exposure to combat. “I had been in Spain during the civil war,” he says. In waters off England, he adds, “the ship next to us had been hit by German planes, so I’d seen bombing and shooting before. I wanted to size up the situation.” Semenov returned to his cabin and put on a new suit and an overcoat, even taking some time to decide between two neckties. A photograph taken later in a lifeboat attests to his account—Semenov’s fedora looks the worse for a night of rain, but his suit and carefully knotted tie are surprisingly presentable. By then Semenov had given his overcoat to a crew member who had rushed on deck in his underwear. Before getting in a lifeboat, Semenov also had gone to the galley and snatched up three loaves of bread. “I knew we might be in the lifeboats for a while,” he says, “and the rations in the boats wouldn’t be enough.” As the burning ship sank lower in the water and the lifeboats and raft pulled away, the crew could see the submarine illuminated by flames, its deck gun now silent. “They didn’t fire at the lifeboats,” Semenov recalls. “In those days, everyone played by the rules.” Using the small compass on the lifeboat, the survivors sailed west by northwest toward the shipping lanes. After three days, a patrol plane, searching for sailors from any of the half-dozen ships sunk that week, spotted Semenov’s lifeboat. The next day, after a night of heavy rain, the American destroyer USS Broome rescued the men and soon picked up the other lifeboat and its survivors. (The raft was found three weeks after the sinking, with only one man still alive. Captain Cobb had died in the other lifeboat and was buried at sea, along with a crew member who had been killed in the shelling.) In all, 27 Alcoa Guide crew members survived; seven perished. During preparations for the NMAH exhibition, about U.S. shipbuilding efforts during the world wars, curator Paula Johnson heard about Semenov’s wartime experiences while touring the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association at the Calhoon Engineering School near Easton, Maryland. She visited Semenov at his home on Long Island in New York. “He told me his remarkable story; when I asked if the museum could have the compass, he immediately said yes.” Not long after his return to port, Semenov enlisted in the Army and served as an engineer on troopships and supply ships with both the Army and Navy in the Atlantic and Pacific. He continued to serve in the military and as a merchant seaman until 1987. Semenov’s nemesis, the U-123, was intentionally scuttled by the Germans off the coast of France in 1944, but was salvaged by the French Navy. Re-christened the Blaison, the sub remained in service until 1959.
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