Apollo 13: This movie star’s mom helped save astronauts in labor!

On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the moon. Two days later, he lost one of his oxygen tanks. The crew no longer had enough oxygen to complete their mission and thus contacted Houston, uttering the legendary phrase: “Houston, we had a problem“(“Houston, we had a problem“In french).

FYI, “We have a problem“(“We have a problem”) that Ron Howard’s movie Apollo 13 made popular was therefore a misquote. A TV movie in front of him Houston, we have a problem by Lawrence Dohen (1974) also used a false variant.

The ground crew then asked the astronauts to shelter the LEM, the Apollo Lunar Module, and use it as a lifeboat to return to Earth. A return route was made to take them home.

However, electricity and water supplies were limited, and the primary guidance and navigation system used too much water for cooling. As a result, after the lunar module engine burnout, the abort guidance system (AGS) was used for most of the return. Four days later, on April 17, the Apollo 13 crew landed in the South Pacific Ocean – broadcasting the return broadcast live to more than 70 million people.

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Among those who helped create the AGS guidance system was aerospace engineer Judith Love Cohen, who is also known for her work on the Hubble Space Telescope project. However, his work on the Minuteman missile guidance computer and the AGS were critical to the astronauts’ rescue.

According to her eldest son, Neil Siegel, a computer scientist and engineer, her mother “His work on the Apollo program is generally considered to be the highlight of his career. When disaster struck the Apollo 13 mission, the abort control system brought the astronauts home safely.”

He will also be present when the crew visits engineers in California to thank them for developing the technology that saved their lives.

At work, in every sense of the word

But the most surprising thing is that while she was working on AGS, Judith Love Cohen gave birth to her fourth child… Jack Black! Indeed, the circumstances of the birth of the famous actor and musician are the stuff of legend. In a dedication to his mother, Neil Siegel recalled this anecdote.

“He went to her office on Jack’s birthday“, he recalled. “When it was time to go to the hospital, he took with him a copy of the problem he was working on. Later that day, he called his boss and told him he had solved the problem. And… oh yeah, a baby was born too.“

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Thomas Jacob Black Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1969. However, Hollywood knows him as Jack Black, an actor who can be seen in films such as Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) or even Richard Linklater’s iconic Rock Academy (2003). ), to name a few. Jack Black He is also a successful musician who notably won a Grammy with his band Tenacious D.

As for Judith Love Cohen, after retiring from the aerospace sector, she created a multimedia publishing house for children that published more than 20 titles before her death in 2016 after a short battle with cancer.