Houston, we've had a problem.

One of the most famous radio communications ever transmitted is also often miss-quoted as "Houston, we have a problem". Small difference, I know. But it does show that the crew of Apollo 13 knew immediately that their mission had changed. On a recent late night visit to the mission control room that received that famous five words, I could imagine the mood instantly changing to one of determined and shared focus: to get those 3 men back safely.

Just walking into this control room gives you a chill. You get a serious sense that you are in a special place. I was whooshed right back to 1970. It smells like 1970. It looks much smaller than you would think, given the incredible amount of amazing firsts this room witnessed. It was this day, April 17th back in 1970 when this room finally erupted in applause and handshakes and sighs of relief when after 4 long and tense days, the crippled Apollo 13 Lunar Module made it back to Earth. This successful failure, as it was called, was not only possible due an incredible amount of luck, but an amazing crew on the ground that made it possible.

Out of all of the amazing things you can see at Johnson Space Center and Space Center Houston, the most human and touching thing was mounted on the wall of the mission control room. It was a small mirror, mounted in a frame with the following inscribed:

This mirror flown on Aquarius, LM-7, to the moon April 11-17, 1970. Returned by a greatful Apollo 13 crew to "reflect the images" of the people in Mission Control who got us back!

James Lovell John Swigert Fred Haise

There has been lots of talk lately with the possible cancellation of the Constellation Program and the fate of the Human Space Flight program for NASA. It is hard to imagine the U.S. not being the leader in space, and in technology. There is so much science that comes from the manned space flight program that the loss of not continuing our program could be, for lack of a better term, astronomical. People quickly forget where much of the technology we take for granted comes from. Air travel and communications as we know it, medical breakthroughs and new materials that will save lives and energy are all possible directly from the space program. If we could only limit our wars and put those billions of dollars saved into educating our next generation of scientist and engineers, we would all be so much better off.

John Bonham

I was just starting my senior year of high school when John Bonham died in September 1980. Looking back now, so many years later, it is hard to believe he was only 32. Just like now, even way back then I was a drum fanatic, and big Bonzo fan. At the time, and still now it is true, he was clearly one of the best drummers of all time. Listening to In through The Out Door today, I was thinking that although it is always a huge loss when a great artist or musician dies before his day, in John Bonham's case, it is hard to imagine what he might have done.

For sure, he would have raised some hell, raced some cars, raised some cows and played some incredible drum parts that we would all still be trying to mimic. He produced a drum sound that is still to this day hardly matched. But is was certainly more than just a huge 26 inch kick drum that made his drum sound possible. Bonham had as much control and dynamics to his playing as he did power and incredible timing. It was all in the feel. The groove.

And although In Through The Out Door might not be the most popular Zeppelin record, it hinted at what could have been. It has a huge variation of playing styles, including some ethnically influenced grooves in Fool In The Rain, some huge classic John Bonham grooves on In The Evening and the heart tugging slow tempo and incredible drum tone of I'm Gonna Crawl. Only Led Zeppelin could have done that record and I remember thinking "I can't wait to see what they do next".

Well there were no blogs back then, but I did write about it in a journal and I ran across it recently. There is a yellowed newspaper article about his death, accompanied by my own prediction that there wouldn't be another John Bonham any time soon. While I was right, you can hear his influence on so many drummers which is pretty cool in itself, but I would rather he were around to see it.

And no doubt he would still be the best.

From my Motivational Series

Make the world your amusement park, originally uploaded by ArcherVision.

see the rest on flickr