nearly impossible task: save three men locked in an airtight metal capsule, hurtling at 3,000 miles an hour through the vacuum of space, their life support systems failing. Advanced satellite communication systems and desktop computers are still decades away. With slide rules and pencils, the engineers have to invent a way to abandon the command module and turn the lunar module into a lifeboat bound for home.
The engineers set about addressing the problems one by one: planning a route back to Earth, steering the craft, conserving power. But conditions are deteriorating. A day and a half into the crisis, carbon dioxide reaches dangerous levels in the astronauts’ tight quarters. If nothing is done the crew is going to suffocate within a few hours. The lunar module has a filtration system, but all of its cylindrical air scrubbers have been exhausted. The only remaining option is to salvage unused canisters from the abandoned command module – but those are square. How to fit a square scrubber into a round hole?
Working from an inventory of what’s on board, engineers at Mission Control devise an adaptor cobbled together from a plastic bag, a sock, pieces of cardboard and a hose from a pressure suit, all held together by duct tape. They tell the crew to tear off the plastic cover from the flight plan folder, and to use it as a funnel to guide air into the scrubber. They have the astronauts pull out the plastic-wrapped thermal undergarments that were originally meant to be worn under spacesuits while bouncing on the moon. Following instructions relayed from the ground, the astronauts discard the undergarments and save the plastic. Piece by piece, they assemble the makeshift filter and install it.
To everyone’s relief, carbon dioxide levels return to normal. But other problems quickly follow. As Apollo 13 draws closer to re-entry, power is growing short in the command module. When the spacecraft was designed, it had never crossed anyone’s mind that the command module batteries might have to be charged from the lunar module – it was supposed to be the other way around. Fueled by coffee and adrenaline, the engineers in Mission Control figure out a way to use the lunar module’s heater cable to make this work, just in time for the entry phase.
Once the batteries are recharged, the engineers instruct crew member Jack Swigert to fire up the command module. On board the craft, he connects cables, switches inverters, maneuvers antennas, toggles switches, activates telemetry – an activation procedure beyond anything he’d ever trained for or imagined. Faced with a problem they hadn’t foreseen, the engineers improvise an entirely new protocol.
In the pre-dawn hours of April 17, 1970 – eighty hours into the crisis – the astronauts prepare for their final descent. Mission Control performs their final checks. As the astronauts enter the Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft radio enters blackout. In Kranz’ words:
Everything now was irreversible … The control room was absolutely silent. The only noises were the hum of the electronics, the buzz of the air conditioning, and the occasional click of a Zippo lighter snapping open … No one moved, as if everyone were chained to his console.
A minute and a half later, word reaches the control room: Apollo 13 is safe.
The staff erupts into cheering. The normally stoic Kranz breaks down in tears.
***
Sixty-three years earlier, in a small studio in Paris, a young painter named Pablo Picasso sets up his easel. Usually penniless, he has taken advantage of a financial windfall to purchase a large canvas. He sets to work on a provocative project: a portrait of prostitutes in a brothel. An unvarnished look at sexual vice.
Picasso begins with charcoal sketches of heads, bodies, fruit. In his first versions, a sailor and male medical student are part of the scene. He decides to remove the men, settling on the five women as his subjects. He tries out different poses and arrangements, crossing most of them out. After hundreds of sketches, he sets to work on the full canvas. At one point, he invites his mistress and several friends to see the work in progress; their reaction so disappoints him that he sets aside the painting. But months later he returns to it, working in secret.
Picasso views the portrait of the prostitutes as an “exorcism” from his previous way of painting: the more time he spends on it, the further he moves from his earlier work. When he invites people back to see it again, their reaction is even more hostile. He offers to sell it to his most loyal patron, who laughs at the prospect.3 The painter’s friends avoid him, fearing he’s lost his mind. Dismayed, Picasso rolls up the canvas and puts it in his closet.
He waits nine years to show it in public. In the midst of the First World War, the painting is finally exhibited. The curator – worried about offending public taste – changes the title from Le Bordel d’Avignon (The Avignon Bordello) to the more benign Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Ladies of Avignon). The painting has a mixed reception; one reviewer quips that “the Cubists are not waiting for the war to end to recommence hostilities against good sense …”4
But the painting’s influence grows. A few decades later, when Les Demoiselles is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New York Times critic writes:
Few paintings have had the momentous impact of this composition of five distorted nude figures. With one stroke, it challenged the art of the past and inexorably changed the art of our time.5
The art historian John Richardson later writes that Les Demoiselles was the most original painting in seven hundred years. The painting, he says,
enabled people to perceive things with new eyes, new minds and awareness … [It is] the first unequivocally twentieth-century masterpiece, a principal detonator of the modern movement, the cornerstone of twentieth-century art.6
What made Pablo Picasso’s painting so original? He changed the goal that European painters had subscribed to for hundreds of years: the pretense of being true to life. In Picasso’s hands, limbs appear twisted, two of the women have mask-like faces, and the five figures seem to have been painted in five different styles. Here, ordinary people no longer look entirely human. Picasso’s painting undercut Western notions of beauty, decorum and verisimilitude all at once. Les Demoiselles came to represent one of the fiercest blows ever delivered to artistic tradition.
NASA’s Mission Control
Picasso’s prostitutes
What do these two stories have in common? At first glance, not much. Saving the Apollo 13 was collaborative. Picasso worked alone. The NASA engineers raced against the clock. Picasso took months to commit his ideas to canvas, and nearly a decade to show his art. The engineers weren’t seeking points for originality: their goal was a functional solution. “Functional” was the last thing on Picasso’s mind – his goal was to produce something unprecedented.
Yet the cognitive routines underlying NASA’s and Picasso’s creative acts are the same. And this is not just true of engineers and artists – it’s true of hair stylists, accountants, architects, farmers, lepidopterists or any other human who creates something previously unseen. When they break the mold of the standard to generate novelty, it is the result of basic software running in the brain. The human brain doesn’t passively take in experience like a recorder; instead, it constantly works over the sensory data it receives – and the fruit of that mental labor is new versions of the world. The basic cognitive software of brains – which drinks in the milieu and procreates new versions
