Before he was a NASA astronaut and commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 flight, the one that never landed on the moon but miraculously made it back to earth, Jim Lovell had already experienced being “lost in space.” As a Navy pilot out on a routine nighttime flight, his aircraft suddenly lost all of its navigational systems. Miles away from his ship with nothing to guide him back to the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La, Lovell decided to go completely dark. He turned off all of his cockpit lights and peered out in the utter blackness of the sea.

Soon he spotted a wrinkle of glowing water. The “glow” was created by the churning of the sea in the wake of the huge carrier. Tiny bioluminescent sea creatures jelly fish, crustaceans, shrimp, even worms that had been frothed to the surface of the se…