"Apollo 13 was really a classic case of crisis management. It was a case where those qualities that are so necessary to be successful in these situations came out in spades on Apollo 13. It turned an almost certain catastrophe into a successful recovery. Those qualities include good leadership -- good leadership throughout the organization. Leadership develops teamwork, and it was teamwork that was the glue that got the job done. And then there was the quality you'd call imagination or innovation, because in planning and training for the flight, we thought we'd covered all of our bases. But there are always problems that come up or crises we had not trained for. Then, of course, there's perseverance. Mission Control had to fall back to square one and think of something new in a very short amount of time. The last quality that was so important in Apollo 13 was motivation. Of course the crew was well-motivated. We all know about that, but it was the people working back home too."
-- James Lovell, astronaut aboard the perilous 1970 Apollo 13 mission that suffered critical malfunctions in space, speaking to a crowd of about 1,600 Wednesday (Jan. 25) at Eisenhower Auditorium on Penn State's University Park campus. Lovell spoke as part of the Distinguished Speakers Series. For more information about the DSS, visit http://live.psu.edu/story/13359 online.