Don’t you love it when you turn on your computer and it is suddenly nonfunctional? I certainly do. That’s why I’ve spent the last several hours loudly praising the brilliant engineers at Microsoft for their phenomenal work on Windows 10, which never, ever bugs out and prevents me from doing anything on startup. Thank you Microsoft.

Anyway the process of troubleshooting my PC without access to the Windows key got me thinking about how critical even a single button can be. How comical would some movies become if the bomb switch in the villain’s hand simply didn’t work when he finally pressed it? What if Batman splattered against the wall of his batcave because the motion sensor had died and didn’t open the doors for him? Or on the other hand, what otherwise innocuous situations could become full on nightmares if a single piece of technology failed at a critical moment? You’ve arrived at home but your smart lock refuses to unlock the door, your key breaks off in the lock, and then the automated security sees you trying to break into your own house and calls the cops on you. You’re doing the biggest presentation of your life and suddenly the PC running the show fails, everyone rolls their eyes, and now you’ve missed your big chance. You’re in a deep water submarine and the literal Xbox controller you jerry rigged to control the thing gets stuck in the ‘dive’ position … Too soon? Sorry, but you get the point.

Usually when I see technology fail in a fictional story it’s due to some plot element. Someone has sabotaged the facility, or there was a manufacturing defect caused by callous greed, or someone took it upon themselves to ‘upgrade’ the system and now they’ll have to awkwardly explain how they actually broke it. It’s just more convenient for both the author and the reader. Introducing randomness into a story rarely makes it any more compelling. That said though, I think some of the most suspenseful moments in history have come from true to life examples of things going suddenly wrong.

Recognize this? This one wasn’t the result of a computer error, but rather a failure to put shapes into the right hole. Some of the smartest engineers on Earth, who designed a spacecraft to go to the Moon for the Apollo 13 mission, didn’t realize that their older, box shaped filters wouldn’t fit into the new cylindrical air filtration system used for the Apollo 13 mission. I can’t quite call this a technological error, it’s more like an infrastructure problem. How does this happen though? It seems incredibly unlikely for such a huge problem to slip through the gaps. Especially on such a vital component of the mission. Like a computer failure, the complexity involved with going to space probably led to a simple, but critical error somewhere along the line. It’s no easy task to go to the moon, or trick rocks into thinking for us.

Another fascinating image from space I found is this picture of the lunar rover with a seemingly haphazard fix of a torn fender:

The make-shift repair on the Moon. Photo: NASA AS17-137-20979

Those are lunar maps duct taped together and held in place with clamps. This happened during the apollo 17 mission, and it’s not as innocuous a problem as it may seem. Gene Cernan accidentally tore the fender off when the hammer on his toolbelt caught on the edge of the back right fender. Gene’s reaction was even recorded the moment this happened. You know that man can keep a real cool head because this rendered the rover completely unusable long term. How? Because without the fender, it would kick up so much lunar dust that when the dust settled on instruments and the astronauts’ suits, the extra heat it absorbed would lead to, you guessed it, random mechanical failure.

There are too many of these examples to count when it comes to spaceflight. Neil Armstrong famously saved NASA’s butt when a software error caused their spacecraft to lose attitude control. In 1962, the Mariner 1 craft had to be destroyed in flight due to a single missing operator that was left out of an equation when translated into punch cards. The Soviets experienced a similar issue when their Phobos 1 craft initiated a steering test during actual flight, again caused by singular missing character. In 1996 an integer overflow error on the Ariane 5 rocket caused it to veer off course and blow up. Recently, a company whose stock I own called RocketLab had a mishap on the launchpad after an electrical arc shorted out several battery packs linked to the rocket’s control motors.

But the thing is, none of these are truly random happenstance. These were all things well under human control. Software errors, infrastructure problems, and engineering issues can all be minimized, though never completely eliminated. Even the ones you can’t prevent don’t ever have to happen more than once. I chalked up my computer trouble to randomness, but I could comb through my computer’s logs and trace down the exact moment a file got corrupted and probably figure out a good reason. Maybe the real reason things in fiction are never as random as they seem in real life is just that we know more about the so-called ‘random’ situations. When the source of the problem is known, suddenly it seems like a perfectly logical series of events, just as one might find in a novel. They let us see all the small pieces that went into a sudden failure, human or mechanical. With that in consideration, it feels like Gene Cernan’s understated reaction to a weak fender is a lot more appropriate. Maybe loudly singing my praises for Microsoft’s impeccable quality control is actually a worthless use of energy. Then again, it did make me feel better, so I guess there’s that.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley