Apollo 13, Love & Duct Tape

“It isn’t equipment that wins the battles, it is the quality and the determination of the people fighting for a cause in which they believe.”

- Gene Kranz (Failure is Not An Option)

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I love transport. I love watching how things move and studying how things get from A to B. Whether it be a train, an aircraft or the movement of a horse in motion.  I love understanding why things work, and crucially, how to fix them if they don't.

Since I was a child, I have tended to hyper-fixate on things. In my teens I counted Tube numbers and kept a notebook detailing when stock was updated. I was taken to the London Transport Museum on Valentine’s by an attentive boyfriend and cried when I realised the ticket was valid for a year! I lectured students on the design of HMS Terror and Erebus on excursions to the Greenwich Maritime Museum. During Covid, I was obsessed with submarines and wanted to join the Royal Navy.

What I love about travel is that when you are in motion, you can physically see time passing. You understand it visually, in a way that the stillness of Zen Buddhism often sends me to sleep when meditating. I can’t find tranquility being motionless. Put me on a trampoline or a bouncy castle and I’ll find inner peace. If I ever feel depressed, (and I’d be lying if I said I don’t sometimes), put me on a plane and let me experience climbing to 5,000 feet during take-off. My depression lifts as the cockpit does. My desire to live and experience every force on my body returns. It overwhelms me, the actual physics of being alive. 

I love flying, because I am frightened of it. Due to a long-standing phobia I decided to learn how planes worked, evaluating the differences between an Airbus and a Boeing. If something terrifies you, become an expert in it. Let your intrigue be recalibrated into pleasure. If you can't understand something in yourself, put the confusion into an object and analyse it from there.

At the centre of these obsessions with travel, there has always been one giant love. Space. The most exciting mystery. When I was about seven, my dad returned from a trip to Washington DC and gave me a structure showing how the universe expanded. He’d bought it for me from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. That structure still sits on my bookshelf, next to a broken ceramic snail I made and a first-edition Stephen King hardback.

In 2017, after experiencing a tumultuous, drawn-out post-Fringe breakup which ended via email at 2am in a US Marriott hotel, my family cheered me up with a surprise trip to the Smithsonian on a family holiday. Finally, I got to visit the place I’d dreamed about. I saw the Apollo 11 Command module, aerodromes and diagrams explaining how flight works, and there, I fully understood our family catchphrase: Failure is Not An Option.

It’s a phrase often attributed to Gene Kranz and popularised by the film Apollo 13. When I tell people it’s our family motto, they often joke, “That’s healthy.” But it is not about being the best or being a success, or avoiding being the worst, it is about being and refusing to stop being.

For us, failure isn’t falling short. It’s stopping. It is refusing to acknowledge the situation around you. It is giving up. It’s being a broken down train with no rail replacement bus service. It's letting other people decide the outcome for you. 

Thus, my long standing love for Apollo 13.

And why Apollo 13? Why does it make me cry everytime I think about it?

Because they got home. It was a successful failure.

The original task was to land on the Moon. Then a catastrophe occurred, and the plan had to change. Suddenly, the goal was no longer exploration, it was survival. Get them home.  There is no 'just' in that sentence. No "just" get them home'. Get. Them. Home.

That task cannot be underestimated. It is not lesser than visiting the moon. It was far more complicated because, to be frank, the situation NASA found themselves in was an absolute hot mess. Everything that could go wrong, did. Timing was everything. To use a clown phrase "They were in the shit."

In the Apollo 13 film Gene Kranz says "I don't care what anything was designed to do. I care about what it can do." . In the Apollo 13 mission, ingenuity, creativity and breaking everything down and reputting it back together mattered.

Apollo 13 consisted of three main parts: the Command Module, the Service Module, and the Lunar Module. During Apollo 13, an oxygen tank in the Service Module exploded, a fault set in motion so far back in time that there was no use pointing fingers, no need to do a “They did this”, “You said that”, “If you hadn’t….” . The wiring had already been laid. No malice had been intended. Their fate was sealed. For reasons unintentional, something was going to go wrong and Apollo 13 was never going to land on the moon. Like many situations in our lives, no matter the best intentions, a cataclysm was coming.

Mission Control, led by sexy Gene Kranz, realised they had to shut down the Command Module almost entirely to conserve power for re-entry. The crew transferred into the Lunar Excursion Module and used it as a lifeboat. No time to waste. No arguments. No sadness that they couldn't land on the moon anymore. 

When I re-learned this, it felt like a perfect explanation of what my brain did in 2025. Some may call it dissociation, but essentially my Command Module was in a predicament and power needed to be conserved. Honestly, I can’t fully remember a lot of 2025. It is as if part of me wasn’t there, or when I look at it, I’m floating above, watching another wobbly red headed woman with a sciatic spine and soft stomach be a murderous pony on stage. I am tethered to her Lunar Capsule, but I am drifting above it, without any control - letting zero gravity do the rest. 

Like Apollo 13, an explosion occurred and my Command Module had to shut down. In a calm, split-second decision made by all the mad women, characters, horses, and animals that live in my brain, everything essential was moved into the Lunar Module. The lifeboat. Because otherwise, it felt like something in me might have died. 

I was operating on minimal energy, doing only the basics to travel the shortest distances and get through the important things. In the case of 2025, that meant touring Australia and the UK pretending to be a Horse.

At the start of January 2025, I was engaged. A wedding date was planned. A bouncy castle was booked. A dress was ordered. I had a full year of tour dates ahead of me. By April I was no longer engaged. The wedding was cancelled. The bouncy castle deposit was lost. The dress hung like a haunted spectre in my sister’s bedroom because I couldn’t bear to look at it. And still, I had to go on stage every night. Because obviously. When something goes wrong, you don’t stop. You still have to travel and get from destination A to B. Failure Is Not An Option.

The day my relationship ended, in a concrete hotel room under a flight path in Sydney, as the final WhatsApp messages came through, I had thirty minutes between leaving my hotel room, walking down the street to the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, and performing in a comedy gala for the Sydney Comedy Festival as a character called The Woman on the Edge. 2,000 watched. I think about 10 people got the character. 

As I performed, it felt as though my body and brain fractured just to get through the moment. Someone else took the controls and said, “Don’t worry, darling, I’ll do these bits. You have a wine and sort your hair out… ”.

Now, in and amongst this, if you have ever endured a heart break or a personal calamity, you may unfortunately have to have an interaction with someone I like to call “very fucking irritating” (NASA acronym: VFI). This person does not know you , yet has happily seen enough memes and TikToks to consider themselves a professional relationship counsellor. They will give you what they call “advice” and what you will call "unsolicited" and “ evident justification for committing their murder”. In this case, whilst in Australia, when I would mention “Oh, I’ve had a bit of a time recently. My fiance and I just split up…” there would be a pause, before the V.F.I would say “Have you heard of Kintsugi?”. I would have to nod politely and hold myself back from finding an axe as they would explain that Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, so the cracks are highlighted and celebrated - standng for the concept that “You are more beautiful for having been broken”. 

It is a beautiful concept. If you are a pot.

I am not a pot. I am a 34-year-old woman. Who every day has to go on stage and pretend to be a horse in order to pay my rent and the wedding I am no longer having.

Now, forgive me if I am making too many assumptions here, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that if you ask people who have been through trauma what they’d choose, given the option, I think most people would say:

“I would have preferred not to have been broken at all actually. Let’s skip the gold and give me my mental stability back. If it is a choice between looking like a bland boring porcelain pot or something that looks like it's been put back together by a toddler with a gold gel pen, I would have preferred not to have been fucking broken in the first place.”

(I find it interesting that when processing PTSD, trauma, grief and heartbreak, many of my female friends have had this platitude thrown upon then, but few of my male friends hav.

Let's give a moment to ruminate on why something to do with a fixing an object gets associated with women...)

puts the axe down

And this is where Apollo 13 comes back in.

During the mission, once the crew were in the Lunar Module, another problem emerged: carbon dioxide levels were rising. The Lunar Module was designed for two bodies, not three. The lithium hydroxide canisters that scrubbed CO₂ in the Command Module didn’t fit the Lunar Module system. Visually, you basically had square pegs, round holes. They needed to get them to fit, or, death. 

Using only the materials available onboard, cardboard, plastic bags, hoses, and duct tape, (essentially what most clowns take to Edinburgh fringe),  engineers on the ground designed an improvised solution. Jim Lovell said “The contraption wasn't very handsome, but it worked."

This is exactly how I felt, and still feel now in 2026. Apollo 13 was broken. It had exploded. It was missing parts. Oxygen was leaking into space. Nothing was functioning as intended. And yet, through resourcefulness, focus, facts, and duct tape, the beautiful steely-eyed missile men of Nasa made it survivable.  Mission control used facts. Not anecdotes, not assumption. They looked at the data, and without panicking, they helped get those three astronauts home when they were feverish, frozen and trapped with their own floating faecal matter in space.  Those men who were so far away, smaller than a tiny ceramic snail in the distance. Scientists and engineers in Mission Control stayed up all night, working together to keep Apollo 13 on the right trajectory to safely re-enter the earth’s atmosphere, without burning up or bouncing back into space. 

In the latter half of 2025, Mission Control was every woman on my phone. Friends and family who kept me tethered. Failure was not an option. I had to keep being a horse and putting one hoof in front of another and so my friends and family found the duct tape and helped me restore my life boat. I wasn't handsome, but, I worked and it was because of the mission control.

Now in 2026 , when people ask me how I am now, I don't feel like a gold plated pot. I am not more beautiful for having been broken. I am a shonky, messy, little rocket, and I am covered in duct tape, and despite needing a few repairs, I am working, and still able to travel.  I had a rupture, but I landed, and I'm home. Like so many of people who have experienced heart break or catastrophe. We don't stop. We fix ourselves and we carry on with a new trajectory.

When I talk about love, I will talk about the moon. Ask about my friends and I will explain the importance of NASA mission control. Ask me about grief and I'll talk about Mir.   Ask me about my emotions and I'll explain the Go-No-Go verification process. 

In 1962, John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the Moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”

For me, that is what love is.

It is going to the Moon. And each time, if the trip doesn't work, or the plan has to change, refuelling, coming home and relaunching again.

The Woman On the Edge is at the Omnibus Theatre 5th, 6th and 7th Feb at the Omnibus.