The Right Stuff

First, the characters...

The resin came by U.S. Mail from Lufkin, drawn from the piney woods of east Texas. The rubber came by ship from the Philippines, tapped at a plantation in Mindanao. The calcium carbonate came by train from a limestone quarry in Ontario, Canada. These ingredients all came together at a manufacturing plant in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin and left again in a cardboard box in the back of an eighteen-wheeler.

A thrilling beginning to our tale...

The semi unloaded the box at a distribution center in Orlando, Florida, and there it sat for several weeks before being loaded onto another smaller truck. That truck drove east for an hour through the gator-filled swamps and delivered the box to a small hardware store in Titusville. The box was opened there and the innocuous contents placed upon a shelf.

The plot thickens...

A handyman working at Merritt Island soon stopped into the store and put a few of the items from the box into his basket. When he came back to work, he tossed them into the janitor’s closet. There they sat until a young supply clerk came along with his clipboard. He took one of the items and dropped it into a toolbox which he then loaded onto a jeep that was driven out to a lone tower, its base shrouded in steam. On April 11, 1970, the mundane little item began another journey, this one a long and nearly disastrous one.

...and then it twists...

NASA still lists duct tape on the inventory sheets of every space-flight made. However, the instruction manual states that it’s to be used to restrain someone suffering from severe psychosis, not to jerry-rig a carbon-dioxide filter to save the lives of three freezing, oxygen-deprived astronauts aboard a crippled Apollo 13 lunar command module.