Square Filter, Round Hole

Mission Control gives engineers replicas of only the materials aboard the spacecraft and tasks them with fitting the Command Module’s square lithium-hydroxide canisters into the Lunar Module’s round receptacle before transmitting a procedure to the crew.

The team constrains the solution to real deployment resources, prototypes on representative hardware, and communicates a tested procedure before astronauts act—a positive model of sandboxing, scalable oversight, and deployment assurance.

This is human emergency engineering, not AI; the real Apollo 13 fix was more distributed than the film’s compressed scene.