Failure Is Not an Option

By Andrew Shaffer, Pa Pro-Life Federation's 2015 Essay Contest Winner, Senior High Division

Space has fascinated humanity since our earliest days. Our ancestors looked up into the  night sky in wonder – witnessing there the awesome design of cosmic detritus, arrayed, to their eyes, in epic stories of gods and demons, life and death. We, as heirs to their awe, have breached the intangible veil separating this world from the maw of nothingness beyond, we have tested the waters surrounding our solar home, and we have gazed deeper, further, than any before us. In our unwearied search, we have discovered much about the universe and, surprisingly, ourselves. Space, or rather our quest to conquer that infinite frontier, can be viewed as an empyrean mirror to our lives. Though it is an apparently exotic region, space can tell us more about life than we often care to realize. 

One such occasion which proved the depths of the human heart was the ill-fated undertaking of Apollo 13. Its crew of three intrepid astronauts, James Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Haise, lifted off from Earth on April 11, 1970, atop a blazing white pillar of volatile fuels, racing heavenward. Their mission, the third manned expedition to our pale grey satellite, flew straight and true until the third day of its voyage. On the 53rd hour, according to the mission clock, the vessel’s oxygen tank ruptured in a catastrophic detonation of cryogenic fire. Lovell, uttering his famous words, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” had only just scratched the surface of their predicament. Apollo 13 was, without a miracle, dead in the infinite, inky blackness of space. 

NASA’s earth-bound mission control, however, would not see its crew lost. Mustering the untold muscle of its greatest minds, NASA plotted a new mission – one which would see its astronauts safely home. The sojourn on the moon was abandoned, and the crew ordered to shut down all non-essential systems on board their cramped, metal life raft. As toxic carbon dioxide began to build in Apollo 13’s underpowered cabin, mission control set to their work, expending their time and energy, 24 hours of it, devising an autoschediastic remedy. Through NASA’s indomitable determination, the explorers were returned to Earth – alive. 

Now, what does this event teach us? Though we might gain a number of insights, there is one, often overlooked, which I find vital – it is the value of human life. Consider if you were in the place of Lovell or Swigert or Haise, or better yet, consider yourself in the place of NASA’s mission control. It would have been easier, by far, to simply abort the mission, pack up, and regroup the next day to deal with the press; easier still to simply let the three explorers drift away into a cool, painless sleep, never to awaken again. 

Yet, they didn’t. They held to the notion that the pain of returning the crew of Apollo 13 to Earth would be well worth the lives of the men that they saved. They believed that life was worth something, no matter the difficulty, no matter the possibility. The crew themselves realized that, too. The return to Earth was not an easy journey, nor was it pleasant – they faced the icy grip of death each day, yet they remained resolute that, if it was in their power to survive, then they would survive. 

Imagine now, instead of a crew of astronauts, no longer brave explorers, the body of a man in the deep recesses of a coma. His mission, not to reach the moon, but to recover his faculties, lost not in the explosion of an oxygen tank, but in some other, sublunary misfortune. Would we do as much today for this man as NASA did for its lost crew? Would we care as much for a single man, seemingly unimportant in the machinations of history? Or, would we be complacent in apathy, in indifference? I can only hope we would choose the former. 

Every life is worth the pain of saving; if we realize this, then the pain we feel isn’t pain at all – it is something else entirely: love. Though one might say it would be better to die with dignity, there is no dignity in giving up, from any side; for in the words of NASA flight director, Gene Kantz, “Failure is not an option.” We cannot fail them through the evil of euthanasia, for, if Apollo 13 has taught us anything, it is that life is worth all that we can give and more.

For additional writing from members and associates of the St. Gabriel Respect Life group, see below:

https://stgabrielcarlisle.squarespace.com/our-pro-life-views-1/