Max Mccoy, Missouri Independent

HUTCHINSON — Stare into the open hatch of Odyssey, the scarred Apollo 13 command module in which three American astronauts made their improbable return to Earth from a seemingly jinxed lunar mission, and ponder the fragility and strength of humanity.

Recently I did just that, and whispered thanks to the universe for bringing back another set of astronauts. I had not realized the depth of my anxiety over the Artemis II lunar flyby mission. When the crew safely splashed down off the coast of San Diego on April 10, my sense of relief surprised me. It was as if I’d carried the worry on my shoulders and the weight was lifted.

To explore this reaction, I embarked on a civic pilgrimage to Hutchinson.

It was my intent to commune with the bit of space history that I most closely identify with the Apollo era of lunar exploration. Some might consider Colombia, the Apollo 11 command module on display at the Smithsonian, to be the single most important NASA artifact. It was the capsule for the historic first moon landing, in 1969.

To me, Apollo 13 is more compelling.

It’s not just a story of exploration, but of survival.

Odyssey is on display at the Cosmosphere space museum, tilted at an angle as if re-entering the atmosphere, its pockmarked skin bearing witness to its journey. The hatch is open so you can see the cramped quarters inside, just enough room for all the needed gizmos and control panels and the three astronaut “couches” made of tubular steel and fireproof cloth.

The ship is in its own glass case at the Cosmosphere, so you can’t touch it, but you can get close enough that you can almost smell space, or at least imagine you can. The smell is ephemeral and variously described as oddly metallic or electrical, or like old gym socks, or oily meat.

If the Apollo 13 crew smelled anything, it was probably their own sweat.

Apollo 13 failed to land on the moon as intended because, on April 13, 1970, some 56 hours into the flight, a cryogenic oxygen tank on the service module exploded. The blast blew a hole in the side of the service module, leaving the Odyssey crippled, without adequate power or breathable oxygen. What was intended to be the third lunar landing became a rescue mission, as the crew temporarily abandoned Odyssey to shelter in Aquarius, the lunar module, while they sling-shotted around the moon. They returned to the Odyssey for splashdown.

That was 56 years ago.

Artemis II made essentially the same trip.

But the four-member crew didn’t just repeat history, they made it. They went farther into space than anyone before, at 252,756 miles, according to NASA, beating the previous record set by Apollo 13. It was also the first time for a woman or a Black astronaut to fly a lunar mission.

“As humans we have this dream to explore,” Éctor Díaz, the Cosmosphere’s director of marketing, told me as we stood in front of Odyssey. “So we are pushing ourselves to go back to the moon, so we can use it as a base for future explorations to Mars and beyond.”

Díaz said he believes we are in a new international space race, and that has created curiosity about the manned missions of the 1960s and 1970s. The Cosmosphere gets about 100,000 visitors a year, he said, with Odyssey probably the most asked-about display.

It was restored by SpaceWorks, a division of the Cosmosphere dedicated to preserving and replicating space artifacts. The capsule’s control panel and other items were fabricated by SpaceWorks, as the originals were missing. Because NASA considered Apollo 13 a failure, Díaz said, the capsule was neglected for years and even loaned to the French for a display at the Musee de l’Air in Paris. Attitudes began to change with the release, in 1994, of “Lost Moon,” a memoir by Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell and science writer Jeffrey Kluger. The book became the basis for the movie “Apollo 13,” directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks.

Odyssey went on display at the Cosmosphere on the day the movie was released in 1995. The capsule is the property of the Smithsonian, the federal government’s group of museums and research centers headquartered in Washington, D.C., but it’s considered on permanent loan at Hutchinson. The Cosmosphere is an affiliate of the Smithsonian.

If you live in Kansas, you might take the Cosmosphere for granted. It’s been around in some form since 1962, when founder Patty Carey was motivated by the urgency of the space race to open a small planetarium in the poultry house at the Kansas State Fair Grounds. Carey had a lifelong interest in science, according to the museum, and had a knack for recruiting volunteers.

The planetarium moved to the Science Building of Hutchinson Community College in 1966. Ground was broken for a dedicated museum and educational space in 1979 and again in 1992. Both times, signals from Voyager I — NASA’s deep-space probe launched in 1977 — were used to ignite black powder charges signaling the expansions. For years, the space museum was known as the Kansas Cosmosphere, but the name has been shortened.

The museum’s collection of American space artifacts is surpassed only by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. It also has the largest collection of Soviet-era space program artifacts outside Russia. Each of the thousands of pieces at the Cosmosphere was either flown, is “flight ready” authentic or is a historically accurate replica — and are so labeled.

Notable among the collection is the Liberty Bell 7, the Mercury spacecraft flown by Gus Grissom and retrieved off the Florida coast; the Gemini 10 space capsule, which orbited Earth in 1966; an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane; and a moon rock collected by Apollo 11. Each object on display has a story to tell about the space race, from the Hasselblad camera that was returned from the lunar surface to the ominous metal key that launched German V-2 rockets during World War II.

The exhibits don’t shy away from uncomfortable facts, and the V-2 rocket on display is an authentic Nazi “vengeance weapon” produced by enslaved laborers. The V-2 was the first man-made object to reach space, and former Nazi scientists, including Wernher von Braun, were instrumental to the success of the American program. Other displays address the tension between the capitalist and communist ideologies that drove the race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

By the time Apollo 13 launched in 1970, the race was over.

With the success of Apollo 8, which did a lunar fly-by in 1968 and produced the iconic photograph “Earthrise,” and the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969, the Soviets gave up any plans for a manned lunar mission. Moon shots had become seemingly so routine that the launch of Apollo 13 didn’t lead the news, at least not until the explosion that scrubbed the mission and imperiled the crew.

In “Lost Moon,” Lovell described the moment as a “bang-whump-shudder” that shook the ship.

Lovell, who was in command, at first thought that lunar module pilot Fred Haise, a known prankster, was playing some kind of joke. But Haise said it wasn’t him. Jack Swigert, the command module pilot, had been in the tunnel between the Odyssey and Aquarius and saw the walls quake.

It soon became apparent from the instruments monitoring the tanks that the crew was in serious trouble, and they reported the problem to ground control at Houston. What they knew was that they would soon be critically low on oxygen and electrical power. What they didn’t know was that the explosion was ignited by a spark from an electrical short in one of the tanks, caused by wiring that had been damaged before the flight.

The tanks were cryogenic, meaning they stored pressurized liquid gas at extremely low temperatures. They supplied oxygen and hydrogen to the ship’s fuel cells to generate electricity and also provided metabolic oxygen for the crew to breathe. Before the explosion, there had been enough to last 14 days. After, they were forced to rely on the consumables in Aquarius, meant for two people for 45 hours. To get back to Earth, the supplies had to last three people for twice that.

The drama that unfolded included the use of the Aquarius as a lifeboat, the need to conserve heat and electrical energy, and the creation of a carbon dioxide scrubber from duct tape and other items on board. The jeopardy of the astronauts caught the attention of the world. For more than three days Americans held their collective breath, especially when the spacecraft was out of communication while rounding the dark side of the moon.

Such attention was in contrast to the Soviet space program, which operated in extreme secrecy. In 1971, three cosmonauts died in space aboard Soyuz 11, but the cause of their death — depressurization and asphyxiation because of a faulty valve — was not released for two years.

Despite competing political narratives that drove the race to the moon, NASA images showing the Earth as a fragile blue orb surrounded by the void of space inspired a sense of common humanity. What started as a program assembled literally from the remnants of Nazi rockets had become, with the moon landing, a transcendent and unifying moment.

The space race was born of the arms race, but what had been embraced by the public wasn’t the conquest of space or military domination of the Earth. What NASA gave us was optimism for the future, a recognition of the fragility of the planet and a celebration of human creativity. The choice to make rockets to the moon or to blow each other up is ours. You can’t see geopolitical boundaries from space. We chose peaceful exploration.

Apollo 13 — and in later decades the Challenger and Columbia disasters — reminded us of the inherent risks of space flight. But Apollo 13 demanded our attention in ways that immediate catastrophic failures couldn’t. The fate of three astronauts attempting to get back home struck a Homeric note in all of us, because even though few of us will go into space, all of us know what it’s like to long for home.

It also turned our gaze from the moon back toward Earth.

The Apollo 13 crew made it back safely, splashing down April 17, 1970.

The crew of Artemis II has now joined, with Lovell and Haise and Swigert, the ranks of those who have dared — and returned. Their 10-day trip around the moon was historic not only because they flew around the dark side of the moon, but that they carried forward a spark thought to have been extinguished half a century ago.

They are commander Reid Wiseman; pilot Victor Glover; mission specialist Christina Koch; and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian astronaut. Díaz, the Cosmosphere spokesman, said the crew has agreed to come to the Cosmosphere, but a date has not been set.

As I stood before the Odyssey at the Cosmosphere, I reflected on why I felt such a sense of relief when I knew these four individuals were safe. At first the news that we were returning to the moon seemed old hat, because we’d been through all that when I was a kid. Back then, I was space crazy, and one of the toys I’ve kept from my childhood is a 14-inch tall G.I. Joe Mercury capsule. The Joe inside even has a miniature Hasselblad strapped to his wrist. It’s on the shelf behind me as I write and was given to me by my paternal grandmother, despite my parents complaining that it was too expensive.

I had been apprehensive about the Artemis II flight because of the capsule’s imperfect heat shield, which one expert gave a 1-in-20 chance of failing. I had also been worried because a lot of details can get lost in 50 years, and it seemed like NASA was essentially starting from scratch, again.

But my reaction at splashdown was more than just relief.

It was something I hadn’t felt in a while.

I harbored a small sense of optimism for the future.

The Apollo program represented the best of what America can do, from a technological and aspirational standpoint. It was about collective effort, courage, creativity and resilience. While space flight will not solve every problem on Earth, it encourages the kind of thinking — and perhaps more importantly, the kind of spirit — that just might solve most of them.

On the day I visited the Cosmosphere, there seemed to be the typical group of visitors. Packs of school kids surged down the hallways, going from one educational activity to another. Older adults passed slowly through the exhibits in the museum, perhaps reflecting on where they were when Odyssey sailed the wine-dark sky.

As I watched, a young couple leaned close to the glass protecting the Apollo 13 capsule.

They were Deborah Medina of Garden City and Jorge Montiel of Wichita. Montiel said he had graduated from Wichita State University as a mechanical engineer and had just landed a job at Boeing. To prepare, he had come to the Cosmosphere to learn about aerospace history.

Peering through that hatch was the place to start.

On the Tuesday the president of the United States threatened genocide against Iran, smoke drifted into our town from the southwest, an acrid veil that hung over streets and homes and businesses.

The haze contributed to the day’s unsettled mood.

The smoke came from controlled fires that slither like snakes over the Flint Hills each spring. These vernal fires are meant to keep invasive plants in check and help renew the grass, but the great clouds they produce sting the eyes and prick the throat. At our home on Constitution Street in Emporia, you could taste the burned prairie with every breath.

It was a fitting atmosphere in which to await the apocalypse.

Whether the president’s threat was sincere or not was beside the point in our new age of nuclear proliferation. A misstep, a mistake, a misread communication might trigger doomsday.

The war with Iran was already troubling my sleep.

In my dreams I often work on machines with tools passed down by my father. Sometimes the machines are recognizable, the cylinder heads on a Ford V8, and other times they are mysterious and their purpose undefined. But on recent nights a new dream had taken hold, one in which I’m following endless M.C. Escher-like staircases to an unknown destination. You probably know the Escher lithograph called “Relativity.”

Current events prove just as enigmatic.

The president had set a deadline of 7 p.m. central for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face the death of their civilization. We were used to bluster from the president, but this threat — posted Tuesday morning on social media — was different. It announced his intention to commit genocide, a war crime under international law. While he did not identify the means by which he would destroy a country of 93 million people, a nuclear strike seemed the only option to accomplish the unthinkable.

It was an unprecedented statement by an American president, one that both shocked the conscience and turned the stomach. As the deadline approached Tuesday, I had a mounting fear that the president was so compromised by mental instability, desperation, or foreign influence that he would actually give the order to launch.

I thought of other events in American history the Iran deadline might be compared to. There was the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps. But in my memory, the feeling of anxiety was closest to the fear and uncertainty of Sept. 11, 2001.

What was there to do?

Kim and I walked the smoke-shrouded streets to our local tavern and had a drink. The television was on behind the bar, but it was showing a cartoon, not the news. I didn’t know if that was good or bad.

We sat down with our drinks (a beer for me, a gin cocktail for her) and pondered our approach to days. Philosophy has been a frequent topic at our dinner table recently because Kim has declared she may be a Stoic. She’s been reading “How to be a Stoic” by Massimo Pigliucci. It has informed many of our conversations about what is the appropriate response to matters beyond our control.

But how do you know where to draw that line?

Stoics would draw the line at epistemology, Kim told me. What can we know about the problem and what can we do about what we know? If the president means the threat, he’s a tyrant and a psychopath, and if not, he’s a liar and a bully.

We have no control over a president’s threat to destroy a nation, but we do have control over our response to that threat. Do we ignore it? Do we applaud it? Do we condemn it and urgently start calling our members of Congress to share our alarm?

Or perhaps you traverse the smoke-filled streets and take refuge in the nearest bar, make notes for a column, and have a couple of drinks.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a chess game between the White House and the Kremlin, in which we came the closest to a nuclear exchange. It ended with the Soviets publicly agreeing to recall missiles from Cuba and the United States secretly promising to remove its missiles from Turkey. It moved both countries toward a nuclear test ban treaty and established a direct communication “hotline” between the two superpowers.

Then there was Sept. 11, 2001 — a Tuesday.

Most of us are old enough to remember the events of that day, the airliners crashing into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and later watching as the towers collapsed, one after the other, on live television. I have friends in New York who witnessed some of these events in real life. Our collective sense of shock was as profound as our sense of horror, and to understand it we had to reach all the way back to 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Our response to 9/11 kicked off the Global War on Terrorism, which was doomed to fail because you can’t wage war against an overwhelming sense of fear. It also led us into 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, campaigns that we arguably lost, despite the investment of thousands of American lives and trillions of American dollars. At home, we traded freedoms — at our airports, public buildings and institutions — for the hollow promise of security.

The average American had no way of predicting any of this on that Tuesday in 2001. We reeled from the shock and trusted, for better or worse, our leaders to guide us through. We bought flags and flew them from our porches, and for a time we were swept by an understandable sense of patriotism.

But last Tuesday was not Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

Those events are unmatched in terms of American lives lost and a shared national commitment. Both led to years of collective effort and helped define the best of America, and the worst: Omaha Beach, Hiroshima, Flight 93 and Abu Gbraib.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unilateral nuclear attacks that redefined the horror of war for civilian populations. There are now at least nine global nuclear powers, and they collectively hold 12,187 warheads, according to estimates by the Federation of American Scientists.

Russia and the United States have roughly the same amount of deployed and stockpiled nuclear weapons, just more than 5,000 each, or a combined 86% of the global inventory. While the world’s nuclear arsenal is down from its high of about 60,000 warheads in 1986, reports the Union of Concerned Scientists, the weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity.

In the U.S., the president can order the launch of nuclear weapons without consulting anyone. This is why we must take any threat from an American president at face value. Our enemies do.

The launch of a nuclear missile anywhere — or the false alarm of a launch — can trigger a cascade of actions, resulting in a world-ending global nuclear exchange in little over an hour.

“Nuclear War,” a 2024 book by Annie Jacobsen, imagines that scenario. The 400-page volume describes in terrifying detail how a full-scale nuclear war would all but instantly end 12,000 years of human civilization. It can all be summed up in one sentence from Jacobsen:

“Nuclear war is insane.”

While the rational among us recoil from doomsday scenarios, there is a significant faction that may long for nuclear annihilation. I was first introduced to the phenomenon as a kid.

I spent most of one summer smoking and reading in a tent in our back yard, and one of the titles I picked up was “The Late Great Planet Earth,” a book by Hal Lindsey that attempted to interpret 1970s current events through biblical prophecy. The end of the world was just around the corner, Lindsey claimed, but Christians would be spared the tribulation by being raptured to meet Jesus in the sky.

Some of my friends and their parents believed this, but I wasn’t buying.

My summer reading of Lindsey did, however, provide me with an introduction to evangelical Christian eschatology. That movement survives today, is politically active, and sees the president as chosen to fulfill God’s plan. Some see the war with Iran as the unfolding of biblical prophecy. This is reinforced by rhetoric coming from the secretary of defense, who has urged Americans to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

I’ve read the New Testament and don’t recall any red-letter quotes advocating for war or the destruction of civilizations. But the secretary of defense wouldn’t be the first to twist the gospel to suit his own needs. As far as I can tell, holy books are mirrors you hold up to yourself.

As the Iran deadline neared on Tuesday, half of the country was plagued by anxiety while the other half seemed oddly unconcerned. It was as if we were trapped in that Escher print, where multiple sources of gravity allowed people on opposing stairs to go about their business, heedless of others. Congress was on Easter recess. GOP lawmakers appeared to back the president’s threat, whether it was real or a bluff. Democratic lawmakers were alarmed, and some called for the president’s removal. By Thursday, the reluctance Democrats had shown in calling for the vice president and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment appeared to have ended.

At the bar on Tuesday night, I doomscrolled on my phone.

The announcement of a ceasefire, about an hour before the deadline, didn’t provide much comfort. It was only for two weeks, details were scarce, and any truce would be difficult to enforce. Within 24 hours, the ceasefire already appeared to be crumbling. Both sides were claiming victory, the Strait of Hormuz was again closed, and details of the agreement were in dispute.

I finally closed the tabs on my phone.

One of my scribbled notes from the bar read simply: Gödel.

Kurt Gödel was a mathematician and analytic philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 and became a naturalized American citizen 10 years later. He had a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he became close friends with Albert Einstein, who couldn’t have done physics without philosophy.

Gödel studied systems. His most influential work was his “Incompleteness Theorems,” which are concerned with the limits of mathematic proofs. They provided the foundation for later the discovery, according to the institute, that a computer can never be programmed to answer all mathematical questions. This preoccupation with systems almost derailed his citizenship test in 1948 because he found what he believed was a logical flaw in the U.S. Constitution. His friends, including Albert Einstein, warned him against bringing it up during the exam.

Known as “Gödel’s Loophole,” the flaw in the Constitution would make it logically possible for somebody to become a dictator and establish a fascist regime. This is what he told the judge administering the test, but the judge dismissed his concern with: “It couldn’t happen here.” The story is recounted by Jill Lepore in a 2021 issue of the New Yorker.

Nobody present at the examination, not Gödel or Einstein or their friend Oskar Morgenstern, ever revealed the nature of the flaw. Scholars believe it probably has to do with Article V, which allows for revision of the Constitution. The problem might be that Article V — which provides for a Constitutional Convention when called for by two-thirds of the states — does not prohibit amendment of Article V itself.

As Lepore points out, that makes it possible for a sufficiently powerful president to persuade his followers to ratify an amendment that gave the president the power to change the Constitution by fiat. At most points in American history, that seemed absurdly unlikely.

But there are now competing laws of gravity.

When I had finished my second beer, we set off.

The air was worse than before. From the pocket of my coat, I fished out a black cloth mask I had used during COVID and gave it to Kim to wear. We walked on through the smoke toward home. It was as if we were breathing risk.

A controlled burn is a calculated risk to improve the landscape. When done responsibly, it also lessens the threat of fire. But it can also get out of control. In April 2021, a controlled burn ignited New Mexico’s largest wildfire.

No threat to use nuclear weapons, either overtly or implied, represents a responsible use of diplomacy. You can’t contain the nuclear fire by setting a smaller one. The danger that it will consume us all is too great.

What Tuesday brought, for no justifiable reason, was a threat of nuclear war and the surrender of American values. We were attacked, but the attack was mounted from within, by a president who rules by mercurial and expletive-laced social media posts. The threat to end a civilization may have marked the final collapse of trust among our allies in the ability of the United States to responsibly govern itself on the world stage.

The civilization Trump may end up destroying is our own.