Houston, We Have a Business Problem
REEL LESSONS
Houston, We Have a Business Problem
What Apollo 13 — and Pete Townshend — taught me about innovation under pressure
Last Friday night, the world watched four astronauts splash down in the Pacific Ocean, completing a 695,000-mile journey around the moon and back. Mission Control erupted. NASA called it a perfect bull's-eye. Commander Reid Wiseman radioed in: "What a journey!” The Artemis II crew was home.
The excitement was electric. And well-earned. Artemis II was the first crewed lunar mission in more than fifty years, a flawless ten-day flight that took humanity farther from Earth than anyone has ever traveled. I'm posting this on April 17th for a reason: today is the 56th anniversary of the day a very different NASA crew came home. That mission also had the whole world glued to their screens. The excitement, though, came from an entirely different place.
April 17, 1970. Three men splashed down in the Pacific after a mission that almost killed them.
No one had been cheering for a lunar landing. Everyone had been praying for a safe return.
I was twelve years old. We didn't have the internet, or streaming, or social media countdowns. We had a television set, and the whole neighborhood was in front of one. Those of us who grew up in the Mercury and Apollo era didn't just follow the space program, we lived it. Every launch was a national event. Every astronaut was a genuine hero. Not the celebrity kind. The real kind. The kind who climbs into a capsule on top of a rocket and goes.
Artemis II just reminded a new generation what that feels like. The difference is that Apollo 13 reminds us of something else entirely, something that matters just as much for anyone building a business right now.
And then, right in the middle of the Artemis II mission, something amazing happened.
On April 6th, the morning of the lunar flyby, Mission Control played the crew a surprise wake-up message. NASA had kept it secret. The voice belonged to Captain Jim Lovell, recorded just two months before he passed away last August at age 97. He said: “Welcome to my old neighborhood. When Frank Borman, Bill Anders, and I orbited the Moon on Apollo 8, we got humanity’s first up-close look at the Moon and got a view of the home planet that inspired and united people around the world. I’m proud to pass that torch on to you. It’s a historic day, and I know how busy you’ll be. But don’t forget to enjoy the view.”
The man whose distance record the Artemis II crew was about to break was the one welcoming them to the neighborhood. Commander Wiseman radioed back: “Very cool to hear him welcome us to the neighborhood.” The Lovell family also sent the crew an Apollo 8 mission patch, which flew aboard Artemis II alongside them.
I have a personal connection to that voice. Which is why I need to tell you about a conference in 2013.
Fast-forward 43 years from 1970. I’m at a conference, and the speaker is Captain Jim Lovell, the actual man who commanded Apollo 13. Afterward, I got two minutes with him. He signed my copy of his book for me. I still have it. One of the most treasured things I own.
What he said that day changed the way I think about innovation. And it connects in a way I didn't expect, to one of the greatest rock albums ever made.
The Scene Everyone Remembers
If you've seen the 1995 Ron Howard film Apollo 13, you know the moment. The engineers at Mission Control dump a cardboard box of parts onto a table, exactly what the astronauts have available to them on the spacecraft. The directive is simple and impossible: the CO2 scrubber is failing. Find a way to make this fit into the hole for this, using nothing but that.
No additional budget. No ordering new parts. No going back to the drawing board. Just a table full of mismatched pieces, three men's lives on the line, and a team of engineers who had to figure it out.
That single image, the box of parts hitting the table, is the best picture of business thinking under pressure I’ve ever seen.
As entrepreneurs, we’ve all been in that room. Maybe not in Houston. But in the boardroom when the budget got cut in half. When the key hire fell through two weeks before launch. When the product that was supposed to differentiate you got commoditized overnight. When the platform you built your business on changed the rules.
The box lands on the table. What do you do?
"We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it." — Captain Jim Lovell
The Quote They Got Wrong
Here's where Captain Lovell corrected something for me.
You know the line from the film. Everyone does. "Failure is not an option." It's on motivational posters. It gets quoted at corporate retreats. It sounds definitive.
It's also not what Lovell actually believes. When he spoke at the conference, he was clear about the distinction. The movie gave us a memorable line. His actual philosophy is this: "Success is the only option."
They sound similar. They're not.
"Failure is not an option" is about denial, pretend the bad outcome doesn't exist, and move forward as if it can't happen. It's the kind of thinking that produces overconfidence and blind spots.
"Success is the only option" is about commitment. You see the stakes with complete clarity. You acknowledge what's at risk. And then you orient every decision, every resource, every mind in the room toward the one acceptable outcome. You don't look away from the problem. You don't minimize it. You face it directly and build the solution from what's on the table.
If you’ve sat through enough corporate off-sites, you know the difference. And it’s everything.
The Successful Failure
Lovell also reflected on something that reshaped my thinking. He calls Apollo 13 a "successful failure."
He didn't land on the moon. That was the mission. He'd trained for it, prepared for it, risked his life for it. And then an oxygen tank exploded and the mission was over.
What came home instead was proof, undeniable, global, historic proof, that NASA's capability to solve impossible problems under impossible conditions was real. Three men made it back to Earth from 200,000 miles away, in a crippled spacecraft, because the ground crew looked at a box of mismatched parts and built a solution.
Artemis II just showed the world what success looks like when everything goes right. Apollo 13 showed the world what capability looks like when everything goes wrong. Both made history. Both mattered.
The mission changed. The capability was proven.
If you're in your 50s or 60s and building a business, you have a few Apollo 13 moments in your corporate rearview mirror. The project that got cancelled. The initiative that got restructured out of existence. The division you built that got acquired and absorbed. The role you were great at that got eliminated in a reorg.
You didn't land on the moon. But you came home with something. You know how to solve problems under pressure. You know how to lead when the plan falls apart. You know, because you've actually done it, how to get people home.
That's not a consolation prize. That's the instrument you play.
What Pete Townshend Has to Do With This
In 1970, Pete Townshend of The Who had the most ambitious creative vision of his career. Flush with the success of the rock opera Tommy, he conceived something he called Lifehouse, a multimedia project unlike anything rock music had attempted. Part concert. Part film. Part philosophical experiment involving the audience in an interactive way that, frankly, the technology of 1971 couldn't support.
It was genuinely revolutionary. It was also completely, catastrophically impossible to execute.
Even his bandmates couldn't fully grasp what he was trying to do. Universal Studios passed on the film component. The concept was so complex that Townshend himself later admitted "pretentious is just not a big enough word" for what he was attempting. The project collapsed under its own weight, and the strain led Townshend to what he described as a breaking point; depression, exhaustion, a creative wall he couldn't get over.
"I was delighted with it. I was relieved to have anything at all, and it felt like the Who's first proper album." — Pete Townshend on Who's Next
What survived the wreckage? The songs.
Townshend brought the music he'd written for Lifehouse to producer Glyn Johns, stripped away everything connected to the failed concept, and recorded a straight album. Eight of the nine tracks on what became Who's Next came directly from the Lifehouse sessions. "Baba O'Riley." "Won't Get Fooled Again." "Behind Blue Eyes." "Bargain."
Who's Next was released in August 1971. Rolling Stone ranks it among the greatest rock albums ever made.
Townshend's verdict? He called it "a fair outcome." Said he was delighted and relieved. He didn't land on Lifehouse. But what came home was extraordinary.
The mission changed. The capability was proven.
Three Things the Ground Crew Knew
Whether you’re looking at Mission Control in 1970, Pete Townshend in 1971, or your own desk right now, the same three things made the difference.
1. Constraints are the instrument, not the problem.
The engineers didn't have what they needed. They had what they had. And they built the solution from those mismatched parts anyway. Townshend didn't have the technology to execute Lifehouse. He had the songs. He used what was on the table.
You can’t outspend Amazon. You can’t out-staff the big guys. But you have 30 years of real-world experience, real relationships, and the ability to make a decision today that a corporation couldn’t get approved for six months. That’s not nothing. Work it.
2. The innovation mindset has to be installed before the crisis hits.
What made the CO2 scrubber solution possible wasn't a sudden burst of genius in the moment. It was a culture of systematic problem-solving that NASA had built long before Apollo 13 lifted off. The engineers knew how to think under pressure because they'd been thinking that way all along.
For your business, that means building your own culture of experimentation now — when the pressure is manageable. Test something small this week. Document what you learn. Try the opposite of what you assumed. The habit of creative problem-solving doesn't appear on demand. You build it.
3. Redefine the mission. Never lower the standard.
Lovell didn't decide that "getting halfway to the moon" counted as landing on it. Townshend didn't release a half-finished version of Lifehouse and call it done. They both changed what the mission was, and then executed the new mission at full intensity.
When the original plan doesn’t survive contact with reality, and it often doesn’t, you don’t lower your standards. You redefine your destination and fly at full throttle toward the new one.
The Box Is Already on Your Table
When Lovell shook my hand in 2013 and signed my book, I was still the kid who'd watched Apollo 13 on a television set. Fifty years hadn't changed that. What changed was that I understood, finally, what I'd actually been watching.
I hadn't been watching a near-disaster. I'd been watching a masterclass in innovation under constraint. In redefining success without surrendering the standard. In building the solution from what's on the table.
Artemis II just gave the next generation their own version of that feeling. Four astronauts, a flawless mission, Mission Control cheering. That's what success looks like when everything goes right.
But Apollo 13, 56 years ago today, showed us something Artemis II didn't have to. It showed us what capability looks like when everything goes wrong. And for anyone building a business from scratch, that second lesson is the one you need most.
The mission you started with may not be the one you finish. Your Lifehouse might not come together the way you envisioned. The oxygen tank might blow when you're 200,000 miles from home.
None of that changes the answer. Face it directly. Orient everything toward the one acceptable outcome. Build from what's on the table.
Success is the only option.
What constraints are you treating as dead ends that might actually be your instrument? Drop your answer in the comments, I read every one.
Keep rocking.
About Alan McKee
Alan McKee is the author of The Amplified Entrepreneur: Building a Business That Rocks (Amazon #1 Hot New Release, Business Education) and the founder of AmpMyBiz.com — a business education platform that uses classic rock stories to help encore entrepreneurs build businesses that last. Reel Lessons is a series connecting great films to the entrepreneurial principles in the book.
