A few summers ago, I saw “Apollo 13”, one of the great engineering movies of all time (not that there are that many to choose from). For those who are unfamiliar with the story, an oxygen tank explodes en route to the moon, and the engineers and astronauts frantically improvise solutions to get the spaceship safely back to earth.

There were two scenes that stuck out in my mind. In one, there is a crucial calculation that must be made by Mission Control engineers in Houston. The calculation must be done and checked in seconds, or all of the astronauts on the crippled spaceship could die. Of course, this was in the days before PC’s were on every desk top. The engineers hover around the table with their slide rules, furiously calculating as the precious seconds tick away. Finally, one engineer announces the results, and the checker confirms that it’s accurate. As the slide rules cool, the calculations are radioed to the space ship, an adjustment in course is made, and the crew is saved.

As a structural engineer, I’ve prepared many sets of calculations, but none were completed under life or death conditions. It was sort of fun to watch the do-or-die circumstances of this set. The engineers were portrayed as balding and sort of nerdish, but that didn’t matter. They were heroes.

In another scene, the crew has moved to the lunar landing module. The main crew compartment must be shut down, and the lunar landing module was to act as a life boat for the perilous return journey back to earth. The module is required to perform in all sorts of ways for which it wasn’t designed. At one point, a representative of the company that built the module is speaking to the head of Mission Control. As the demands on the module’s performance are piled on, the representative complains that he can’t be sure it will work. He can’t be sure that three people can be transported in the craft that was only designed for two. He can’t be sure that the lunar landing module rockets can be used to correct the course of the damaged spaceship. It wasn’t designed for that kind of performance.

At this point, many engineers in the audience would like to get up and knock this guy’s block off. Here we are, the heroic engineers, doing the calcs (with checking), improvising the fit of a round carbon dioxide scrubber in a square box, solving one insurmountable problem after another. On top of all of that, who do we have to put up with? Everylawyer! The representative in the film is Everylawyer, whining about liability with the astronauts so close to perishing. If, in fact, the lunar module doesn’t perform because it wasn’t designed that way, Everylawyer has covered the company’s tracks. Of course, you end up with a spaceship full of dead astronauts.

“Apollo 13” depicted what we engineers do, albeit in a caricatured and exaggerated way. Our mission is noble and heroic, although in reality, our work story unfolds much more slowly and less dramatically than in the movie. But as in “Apollo 13”, lives depend on our successful work. Society is built on the infrastructure and systems that we design and construct. Society expects flawless performance from these systems, and we manage to deliver. Our bridges rarely fall down. The water flows from the tap when you turn the spigot. These things don’t happen by themselves. Because these engineering successes happen regularly and with little fanfare, people take them for granted. When you walk in a building, you don’t expect it to collapse. Civil engineering projects are expected to perform perfectly. The expectations are met so often, that it’s a great shock when there is a failure. Then we get plenty of publicity.

I’ve often wished that there were more popular presentations of what engineers do, like what was shown in “Apollo 13”. Our work is exciting, gratifying and extremely important, and we’re good at it. It’s time for more engineering TV shows and movies. We’ve seen enough of “LA Law.” It’s time for “Encino Engineer.”