If I only had a dime for every time that exhausted, I had to entertain the power of hope. Waiting for its deliverance, resenting the need to have to summon up its promise, struggling to find the strength to trust in it again—if I had a dime for every time—I would indeed be rich.
Hope is the lonely man’s companion; the faithful man’s best friend and it is, without a doubt, the luxury that no man can afford to do without. We need it when it is all we have, and although merciful, hope refuses to offer a guarantee and it rarely, if ever, provides the easy way out.
Hope—real hope—will require that you boldly reach for something that you are convinced is just not there, while at the same time it will demand that you ignore the undeniable proof that the game is over, while you endure the indisputable evidence that this time there is no way that you can win.
“Houston we have a problem … ”
Those sobering words, and the decisions that followed, would usher in one of the most remarkable and unlikely recoveries in modern day history.
Once upon a time, Man in Space was an unthinkable proposition; a brand new phenomenon that captured the imagination of a generation by forcing the boundaries of what we knew could or could not be. The earth was rendered spellbound as large television sets across a captivated nation transmitted the vibrations of a brave new world. Those memories reside in the collective consciousness of a generation but, with the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, the excitement about the race to the moon was over and the world would turn its attention back to the more mundane.
In April of 1970 when Apollo 13 was preparing to go back to the moon, space travel didn’t seem anymore like much of a big deal. The journey of crew members Commander James A. Lovell, Command Module pilot John L. “Jack” Swigert, and Lunar Module pilot Fred W. Haise was to be a pretty routine flight and, for the most part, anti-climatic until that somber declaration from the man in charge:
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