Finally, the principle shines in modern engineering. When Apollo 13 lost its oxygen tank in 1970, the crew faced rising CO2 and mismatched filters. Mission Control turned the constraint into a design brief: build a square‑to‑round adapter from onboard scraps. NASA’s Apollo 13 Mission Report (1970) and Lovell and Kluger’s Lost Moon (1994) detail how limitation dictated form, materials, and procedure. The failure did not halt action; it specified it. In this way, Marcus’s sentence reads like a systems axiom: let the problem define the prototype, then let the prototype redefine the path home. [...]
