Navigating Apollo 13

Welcome to Star Compass!

What’s inside this week:

🧑‍🚀 This Week’s Mission: Mapping Apollo 13 to your journey

🌌 This Week in Space: Presidential Leadership, Lunar Trail, and Looking Up

🚀 Ask a Rocket Scientist: How can a space career help humanity?

🔭 Next Step: Where are you on your journey?

The famous Apollo 13 line “Houston, we have a problem” occurs nearly an hour into the two-hour and 20-minute movie.

If you haven’t watched it, Apollo 13 is the movie adaptation of astronaut James Lovell leading his crew through the nearly catastrophic lunar mission. Lovell circled the Moon on the Apollo 8 mission (which Artemis II recently revisited). Apollo 13 was going to be his turn to land on it. 

But the plan changed after an oxygen tank exploded. The mission became survival.

Lovell’s life, including Apollo 13, followed a universal storytelling structure called the Hero’s Journey.

The Hero’s Journey isn’t just for astronauts named Jim. Katniss Everdeen followed it in the Hunger Games books and movies. Every aerospace professional facing a program cancellation, a rejection, or a crossroads moment can use this framework to prepare for what comes next.

In 1949, Joseph Campbell wrote a book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In it, he presented the Hero’s Journey, a monomyth. It begins with the hero receiving a call to adventure, then confronting trials and tribulations, and finishing with the resolution/return. They then share their newfound wisdom to make the world a better place. 

Campbell originally described 17 stages a hero goes through, and Hollywood writer Christopher Vogler shortened it to 12. These are shown in this graphic.

In summary, the 12 stages fall into three acts (the classic storytelling model):

Act 1: Set-up. The Apollo 13 movie starts in the Ordinary World at the Lovell’s Houston home. His family and other astronauts gather around a television to watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Three weeks later, he receives his Call to Adventure with his selection to be the Apollo 13 commander.

Act 2: The Challenge. Three days before launch, Jack Swigert replaces Ken Mattingly in the three-person crew due to concern he could get ill during the flight because of a measles exposure. During launch, the central engine on the Saturn V rocket shuts down two minutes early, and the remaining four engines burn longer to compensate. Fifty-five hours into the mission, the oxygen tank explodes. This last anomaly changes the rest of the journey. The Ordeal is to successfully return to Earth. With Mission Control as their guide, the Apollo 13 crew prevails.

Act 3: The Resolution/Return. Lovell and the Apollo 13 crew return to Earth. Apollo 13 is reframed as a “successful failure.” Lovell writes the book Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, with Jeffrey Kluger. The book is the basis for the 1995 Apollo 13 movie grossing over $335 million globally. Lovell passes away on August 7, 2025, at the age of 97.

Where are you in your Hero’s Journey?

Maybe you are just leaving the Ordinary World, with your first Call to Adventure of a new job?

Maybe you are in Act 2, struggling with a current position, and trying to determine how to overcome the Ordeal of figuring out what’s next?

Or maybe you have finished your first adventure and are on The Road Back?

Whatever stage you are in, framing your life journey as a Hero’s Journey can help you understand your path and the why of your adventure.

📡 OPPORTUNITY: Apply to the Presidential Leadership Scholars program before July 19, 2026. The most impactful program of my career.

📚RESOURCE: The Oregon Trail was one of the most successful and influential video games in history, selling over 65 million copies. For the Artemis generation, it has been updated to Lunar Trail. “You have died of dysentery” was game over for Oregon Trail. What has game creator Gregory Melon come up with to signal your end on the lunar surface?

🌎 COMMUNITY: Look up! Venus and Jupiter are putting on a spectacular show in the North America evening sky during June. They appear close together even though they are millions of miles apart in space. From June 11-15, Mercury joins the party, creating a parade of planets in the western sky. Learn more from NASA here.

How can a space career help humanity?

- Anonymous

Answering this question is perhaps the ultimate WHY statement after last week’s newsletter (Find your Compass) .

NASA answers it as a Venn diagram of Science (the late Carl Sagan), National Posture (the late Werner von Braun), and Inspiration (the late John F. Kennedy). The three individuals listed in parentheses were the biggest proponents for each, but they also shared beliefs in all three purposes.

While that worked for Apollo and some of the science missions that followed, it has been a hard sell since. 

There are two more recent predominant space philosophies.

Survival (Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking) because relying solely on Earth is a risk to the survival of humanity.

Preservation (Jeff Bezos and the late Gerald O’Neil) by moving industry off Earth, we can preserve our home planet for humanity.

But do these two philosophies have to be an “or” rather than an “and”?

With both, does it mean we are taking the historical human Earth exploration bad habit of exploitation with us to space?

Are we going to ignore NASA’s planetary protection principle of preventing biological cross-contamination the minute we find resources that are valuable?

Scientific evidence strongly supports the theory that comets are a major source of lunar ice. These preserved deposits could help us understand if comets, which are known to also carry organic materials, seeded life on Earth.

If we rush to exploit lunar resources, we may not answer those questions.

I propose a third philosophy.

Universal conservation takes the philosophies of Earth conservation and America’s best idea of National Parks, developed to protect our home planet, and extends them to our solar system and beyond.

Instead of waiting to respond to industrialization and other exploration exploitation, as we did on Earth, let’s proceed into space, putting our best step forward. This would be a giant leap for humanity. Universal conservation is a why worth building a space career around.

A key stage in Act 1 of the Hero’s Journey is Meet the Guide.

Have you found someone to guide you on your Hero’s Journey?

Lovell had Mission Control. Luke Skywalker had Yoda. Katniss Everdeen had Haymitch Abernathy.

Star Compass is a start.

If you don’t have a guide, your next step is to find one. Who in your network has been where you want to go?