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Houston, We Have a Problem: A Mission of Creative and Critical Thinking

5-Steps to achieve reflective thinking and stay ahead of the AI Game

Ricky Lanusse
8 min readMay 2, 2023
Photo by Jeremy Straub on Unsplash

It’s April 1970.

Apollo 13 is two days into its moonshot when its oxygen tank explodes, endangering the lives of the three astronauts in an unprecedented way in outer space. Astronaut Jack Swigert radios Mission Control with the phrase that would become a street slogan:

“Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

The situation seems hopeless, with the astronauts over 200,000 miles from Earth and fuel, water, electricity, and air running out.

Despite the mission-impossible context of saving three men locked in an airtight metal capsule, hurtling at 3,000 miles an hour through the vacuum of space, and their life support systems failing, flight director Gene Kranz boldly vows that the crew will make it back alive.

The engineers have rehearsed the mission down to the minute. Now they have no choice but to shred that playbook and start over: the only working part of the craft is the lunar module. And NASA has simulated thousands of possible breakdowns, but not this one.

With slide rules and pencils, they have to invent a way to abandon the command module and turn the lunar…

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Ricky Lanusse
Ricky Lanusse

Written by Ricky Lanusse

Patagonian skipping stones professional. Antarctic sapiens 🇦🇶 on https://rickylanusse.substack.com/

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