Apollo 13 jury-rigged air scrubbers to survive the trip home
After an oxygen-tank explosion crippled Apollo 13 in April 1970, carbon dioxide began building up inside the lunar module lifeboat.
Ground teams and the crew taped square command-module canisters into round LM sockets — the famous “mailbox” fix — so lithium hydroxide scrubbers could keep breathing air safe.
Improvised hardware, not luck alone, brought three men home. Apollo 13’s duct-tape chemistry lesson still defines crisis engineering in space.
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