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Two days into its mission to the Moon, both oxygen tanks onboard the Apollo 13 Service Module exploded. Without those oxygen tanks there was no way for the spacecraft to generate power or for the astronauts to breathe. There was oxygen over at the Lunar Module (LM), but it was not built for three astronauts and was certainly not designed for the sort of orbital maneuvering required to bring the crew back home. It was an insurmountable engineering challenge that would have normally taken months to solve. And yet, by the time Apollo 13 looped around the moon, the engineers at NASA had devised a solution to use the LM to keep the astronauts alive and to use its ascent engines to bring the crippled spacecraft back into Earth orbit. Several days later, the crew splashed down safely into the Pacific Ocean.
On a more recent and mundane note, the two supermarkets I frequented had struggled for years to get their online shopping experience to work properly. There were so many issues with signing in, ordering, finding products, paying and general performance, that over the years I had only managed to place a solitary online order with them. The problem seemed insurmountable to their engineering teams.
Yet in the course of ten days in April of 2020, they went from this sad state of affairs to having fully fledged e-commerce experiences that could each cater to perhaps a 1000 times their previous order…
