So I watched Apollo 13 again recently. I didn't mean to. I was cleaning up a bunch of shit in my bedroom, and I wanted something on in the background. I'd forgotten how much I liked this one, so I got sucked back in. I like movies like this. Humanity trapped beyond the known needing to use science to survive and get home? Count me in. You know, like The Martian.
But near the end, after the astronauts get home (spoiler alert), I noticed something, and I had to wonder about it. So they come down in the ocean and are rescued and brought back to America, where their first public appearance shows them wearing hats with the mission details for Apollo 13. That implies that the hats were made before the mission and were waiting for its completion.
But what if they didn't get home? What if they died out there? Or burned up in the atmosphere? What happens to those hats?
Here's the thing. There is someone, possibly a few someones, who knows the answer to that. Space missions are fucking dangerous, and NASA has an unfortunate history of getting astronauts killed. So I can only assume that there are Challenger hats somewhere out there, just as an example. What happened to them? Were they buried or destroyed out of honor for the astronauts who lost their lives? Are they mothballed somewhere? In a museum?
Before I started getting drunk (and now high), this was the kind of thought that would keep me awake at night.
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