1970 Along with Neil Armstrong’s famously fumbled ‘one small step’ and Gene Kranz’s ‘failure is not an option’, this is the best-remembered quote from the 1960s Apollo moonshot expeditions.
The dean of SF authors, Arthur C. Clarke, claimed authorship of the phrase, as co-writer on Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke it was who came up with the line in which HAL 900 breaks into a TV transmission in which Dave Bowman (Discovery’s commander) is listening to his family on earth celebrate his birthday in space with a cosy chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’. There follows the exchange:
HAL: Sorry to interrupt the festivities, Dave, but I think we’ve got a problem.
BOWMAN: What is it, Hal?
HAL: My F.P.C. shows an impending failure of the antenna orientation unit.
This has been almost universally misremembered as: ‘Sorry to interrupt the festivities [Dave], but we have a problem.’ It’s a memorable understatement – ‘litotes’, as grammarians call it. Discovery’s mission is doomed.
Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom (one of the three astronauts burned to death in their space capsule on 27 January 1967) had actually used the ‘we have a problem’ trope in a radio transmission as early as 1961. After 1968, the Apollo astronauts were clearly steeped in Kubrick’s movie, which flatteringly portrayed their quest as Homeric, heroic and quintessentially American.
The most famous recycling of Clarke’s ‘we’ve got a problem’ occurred during the Apollo 13 (ominous number) mission, launched on 11 April 1970, under the command of James A. Lovell, to make the third moon landing. Their command module was named Odyssey, in honour of Clarke’s epic.
Two days later, speeding towards their lunar landing, some 200,000 miles from earth, an oxygen tank exploded. The crew had just dispatched a TV broadcast that used, as its musical theme, the Also sprach Zarathustra motif that opened the film.
Lovell then made his famous ‘Houston, we have a problem’ transmission. Except he didn’t. It was a fellow crew-member, Jack Swigert, who said: ‘OK Houston, we’ve had a problem here.’ It was followed by Lovell echoing the observation with: ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem.’
Life, as Oscar Wilde said, imitates art. In the Oscar-winning 1995 film of the aborted mission, Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) is given the talismanic ‘Houston, we have a problem’. That’s how people will always want to remember it.