by Tod Olson
On Duty: Controllers gather around the flight director’s console, debating how to get the ship back to Earth.
If Lovell, Haise, and Swigert didn’t come home, they would become the first human beings ever to die in space. And the entire world would be watching. Newspapers around the globe were already filling their front pages with news of the crisis. People in New York City had woken that morning to a giant headline in the New York Times: “POWER FAILURE IMPERILS ASTRONAUTS; APOLLO WILL HEAD BACK TO EARTH.” Anyone with a TV got to follow the drama live. They had no video from the spacecraft; the crew couldn’t afford to waste precious power or time sending broadcasts back to Earth. But everything the astronauts said on the voice loop went out to the world. That included Lovell’s off-hand prediction that NASA would not be launching moon missions for a long time to come.
At 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, April 14, the flight directors climbed up to the VIP room overlooking Mission Control. Two dozen NASA executives were gathered exactly where Barbara Lovell and her family had sat for the TV broadcast just 14 hours ago.
Gerald Griffin, the Gold Team flight director, presented the options to the bosses. Obviously, he said, they wanted to get the crew home as quickly as possible. To do it, they could fire up the LEM’s engine as the spacecraft came around the back side of the moon and blast it at full throttle for several minutes. That would get them back Thursday morning, 118 hours into the mission. The controllers in charge of consumables on the LEM loved this option. The LEM would only have to support the astronauts for 37 hours after the burn—until they powered up the command module for reentry. The way they were figuring now, that would leave them with power, water, and oxygen to spare.
All that breathing room would feel like a big relief—but it would come at a cost. The massive burn would eat up nearly all the fuel available to the LEM’s engine; the crew would have precious little to spare if they had to make course corrections later on. And that wasn’t the only sacrifice required. To get the spacecraft up to speed, they would have to lighten their load by ditching the 50,000-pound service module.
At first glance, that didn’t seem like much of a hardship. The service module had been nothing but dead weight since the accident. But it was protecting a critical piece of the command module—a piece that could either deliver the astronauts safely into the ocean or burn them alive 60 miles from home. Nestled under the service module, on the wide base of Odyssey’s cone, was the 3-inch-thick heat shield. The heat shield was built to resist 5,000 degrees’ worth of friction as the command module burrowed through Earth’s atmosphere. But no one knew whether it could survive a day and a half exposed to the freezing-cold temperatures of space. Did anyone really want to find out now?
The alternative to the super-fast burn, Griffin explained to his audience, was a gentle nudge. The controllers had worked out a burn that would speed up the ship a mere 600 miles per hour. The crew could keep their service module and plenty of fuel to nurse them back on course as they neared the Earth. The trade-off was that they wouldn’t make it home until Friday noon, at 142 hours mission time.
When Griffin finished, the flight directors left the bosses to talk it over. The NASA bigwigs debated for an hour, weighing the unknown dangers of the fast return with the known dangers of the slower option. It didn’t take long for them to agree on the slow route home.
The flight directors breathed a sigh of relief. Griffin turned to Lunney and said, “What do you say we quit talking about this thing and see if we can go do it.”
After the burn, the rest would be up to John Aaron and his engineers. Somehow, they would have to make the limited resources of the LEM last another 61 hours. For the crew that meant 61 hours in a ship without a guidance platform, 61 hours in cramped quarters without heat, and 61 hours in which the command module could freeze beyond their ability to bring it back to life.
CHAPTER 10
AROUND THE MOON
On Tuesday afternoon, Barbara Lovell might as well have been trapped in a spaceship. Jeffrey had gone to preschool, so she didn’t have to watch him. Her friends hadn’t been able to get through the wall of secrecy put up by the NASA gatekeepers downstairs. And the mob of reporters still stood guard outside.
In the past, Barbara had hatched escape plans worthy of a spy. On the Gemini flights, when she was still growing quickly, the reporters didn’t recognize her from mission to mission. She’d walk out the door and tell them she was Barbara Lovell’s friend. After they figured it out, they would meet her at the school bus stop in the afternoon. Hey, stop the presses, Barbara Lovell’s coming home from school! To give them the slip, Barbara started getting off the bus early, at the circle where the Glenns and the Carpenters lived. Then she’d walk home the back way, along the canal that ran behind the houses on Lazywood Lane. Sometimes, when people came to pick her up, she’d sneak out the side of the house to the driveway and hide on the floor in the back of the car.
Trapped: Barbara didn’t leave the house during the first day of the crisis.
When she escaped, her favorite place to go was Connie’s house. It was a delicious refuge from the reporters and the Secret Service guys and the people coming and going. She’d slip out the back door and walk along the canal through the Benwares’ yard next door. Once she was out of range of the cameras, she’d make her way to the road and walk to Connie’s—free from it all. It was so calm and peaceful there. They’d go to the grocery store or the pool. If Connie’s dad was around he might take them waterskiing.
Connie, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of Barbara’s house during the missions. The people and the noise and the TV and the squawk box; all of it was exciting to her. Of course, she didn’t have to worry about the reporters, but she probably wouldn’t have minded the attention. The best part for Connie were the days before the flights, when the gifts arrived. An endless stream of stuff just appeared at the door. For free! When the doorbell rang, she and Barbara could go see what they’d gotten: stockings and dresses and specialty foods. Once they got a case of seasoned salt—with the Lovell name on the labels.
Barbara needed Connie now, and she had asked her mother to call off the Secret Service guys. Her mom was surrounded by friends; why shouldn’t she have her friends too?
The message must have gotten through because at some point, she heard footsteps on the stairs. Connie appeared in her doorway. She had taken the escape route in reverse—back by the canal and in the back door. It was great to have her there. She didn’t seem worried about Barbara’s dad, but she had definitely noticed a change in the mood downstairs. It wasn’t like the other missions where people laughed and mixed drinks at the bar between the kitchen and the family room. This time, it just felt dark and somber down there.
With the TV on downstairs, Barbara’s mother and the neighbors who packed themselves into the family room got more news than they needed. From time to time, they sat through special reports from Lazywood Lane—Live, from the Lovells’ front yard! It was a strange, out-of-body experience, like watching yourself on a surveillance camera in a store.
Look, there’s Jeffrey and a friend going off to preschool with their NASA caps on their heads.
Look, there are the neighbors arriving with a casserole.
“Here in the astronaut compound,” declared the CBS reporter, “a spirit of togetherness prevails.”
That may have been true, but he didn’t figure it out from speaking to Marilyn Lovell. Barbara’s mom refused to talk to the reporters. A friend had shepherded Jeffrey out the door to the car in the morning while she stayed inside with the TV and the squawk box.
Most of the news announcers were optimistic. NASA reported that the water, power, and oxygen supply looked good. They were confident that the burn, scheduled for 8:40 p.m., would get the crew home with time to spare.
But when you listened closely, there were always ifs: If the LEM engine performed the way it was supposed to; if the alignment of the spacecraft was good; if the command module could be power
ed up effectively; if the heat shield wasn’t damaged.
In the afternoon, Glynn Lunney sat at a news conference answering questions about his night’s work at the flight director’s console. Eventually they asked him point blank, “Are the astronauts safe?”
“Well, uh,” he said. Then he hesitated and cleared his throat. “They’re safe in the sense that, uh, we have the situation stabilized, uh, we think … We just have to continue to keep it that way.”
You couldn’t take much comfort in a response like that.
Before the burn, a priest arrived at the Lovells’ house to lead everyone in a communion service. Not long after, they’d be joined by people praying all across the country. Congress had passed a resolution asking every American to pause at 8 p.m. Houston time and pray for the safe return of the astronauts.
Father Donald Raish leads Barbara’s mother and friends in prayer on Tuesday afternoon.
At 6 p.m. the sun hung low in the sky over the Lovell house. Two hundred and forty thousand miles away, Jim Lovell gazed out the tiny window of his spacecraft at a sunset of his own. They were 1,000 miles from the moon and closing in at 4,000 miles per hour. The sun had slowly disappeared over the lunar horizon. It was nighttime on the moon, and the sky was breathtaking.
“Man, look at those stars,” Lovell said into the voice loop. “We are in the shadow of the moon now. The sun is just about set as far as I can see and the stars are all coming out.”
“Okay,” said the CAPCOM from the dingy control room in Houston. “And if you are ready to copy, we have LOS/AOS times for you.”
Vance Brand, the CAPCOM on duty, was not interested in the sublime beauty of space travel. In just 25 minutes, Apollo 13 would disappear around the back side of the moon. At that point they would lose all contact with Earth, a condition known in NASA-speak as LOS, or Loss of Signal. Twenty-five minutes after that, they would reappear on the other side of the moon, reaching AOS, or Acquisition of Signal. Then they would prepare for the burn.
At 77:08 mission time, the spacecraft drifted out of contact with Earth. The air-ground loop went dead. For eight minutes they floated in a cave. The moon’s gravity held them in a tight loop, less than 150 miles away. And yet, the moon itself was nothing but a shadow, a looming blackness blotting out the stars.
Then, at 77:16, the sun appeared low on the lunar horizon. The gray, plastery, ancient surface of the moon suddenly burst into view. In the low-angled light, every crag cast a shadow. Every pockmark looked as though you could reach out and trace its contours with your finger.
Haise and Swigert were in awe. Yes, there was a burn to do in two hours. Yes, they still had to travel 240,000 miles in a crippled ship. Yes, there were several ways in which they could die in the next 65 hours. But who could think about any of that right now? They pressed their faces to the windows and started taking pictures.
The far side of the moon comes into view for Lovell, Haise, and Swigert.
Only twelve human beings had experienced what they were seeing right now. The lunar surface filled their windows—no longer a ball hanging in space but a landscape below them. It was ancient terrain, scarred by craters millions, even billions, of years old. On Earth, weather and other forces renewed the surface constantly. Erosion wore down mountains while volcanic activity built them up again. The moon, on the other hand, had no atmosphere and therefore, no weather. Without wind and rain, its surface did not erode. Meteors had bombarded it for eons, and the scars never healed.
Lovell had moved aside so Haise and Swigert could get their fill at the windows. He had been here already, less than a year and a half ago on Apollo 8. He remembered the feeling. The view had transformed the crew—Borman, Anders, and Lovell—from grizzled test pilots to gaping tourists. The landscape looked like nothing he had seen before—bleak and colorless, like a vast abandoned battlefield.
“It certainly would not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work,” Borman had said.
And yet, Lovell would have given anything to work there for a day. “If we could only get that scant 60 miles closer—really down there—” he told Life magazine after Apollo 8 returned, “then we’d have a chance to pry open some of the secrets of creation. The lunar surface was so close. It beckoned.”
But for all the strange allure of the moon, it didn’t compare to the sight that greeted Apollo 8 as it returned to the front side of the moon: the Earth rising over the lunar horizon. It looked as beautiful as anything Lovell had seen—the blue of the oceans, the browns of the land, the gleaming white of the clouds. It was the only spot of color in all the universe.
Earthrise: Home as Lovell saw it from 240,000 miles away during Apollo 8.
“There’s a beautiful moon out there tonight,” Houston had radioed up.
“There’s a beautiful Earth out there,” Frank Borman had replied, with awe in his voice.
People who walk Earth day in and day out don’t appreciate what they have, Lovell had thought. From this far away you could see the planet for what it was—an oasis of life in a vast, empty sky. It looked so fragile; small enough to fit behind his thumb if he held out his arm. And yet it held the hopes and dreams and loves of more than three billion people. It held everything he had ever cared about.
Now, a year and a half later, he was back. At 77:34 mission time, 6:47 p.m. back in the Lovell living room, the Earth rose for Apollo 13, and Lovell made contact with his home planet again.
“Aquarius, Houston,” came the CAPCOM’s voice. “How do you read?”
“Stand by for AOS,” Lovell said. “Houston, Aquarius.”
For a few minutes, Lovell played tour guide for Haise and Swigert. He pointed out Smythii and Crisium, two broad lunar lowlands that were mislabeled “seas” by early astronomers. He told Haise to take a picture of the giant crater Tsiolkovsky.
The ship passes over Tsiolkovsky Crater, named for the Russian scientist who first showed that space travel was possible.
Ten minutes later, Haise and Swigert were still glued to their windows, and Lovell had had enough. His crewmates were rookie astronauts; they might make it back here someday. Lovell, who had spent more time in space than anyone else, probably wouldn’t be assigned another mission. The moon was out of reach for him, and it always would be. Out the window, that other globe—the beautiful blue one—was slowly getting bigger. They all needed to focus their attention in that direction, toward home.
“Okay, look,” Lovell said, all trace of the friendly tour guide gone from his voice. “Let’s get the cameras squared away; let’s get all set to burn. We got one chance now.”
“Okay,” said Swigert.
“We’re not going to hack it at 152 hours,” Lovell added.
With no burn at all, that would be their total mission time. The burn would get them home 10 hours faster. It didn’t sound like a lot, but every minute could turn out to be vital. Getting almost all the way back to Earth before they ran out of power wouldn’t do anyone any good.
They moved through the powerup checklist like experts this time. Haise punched the coordinates into the guidance computer. Once again, they were going without an exact alignment. Fifteen minutes before the burn, Brand told Lovell where the moon should line up outside his window. It was a crude but simple way to make sure they were pointed in the right direction. Lovell peered out and confirmed it was exactly where it should be. They were 6,000 miles away now, the moon back to a full circle in his window. But he could still make out the features. On the edge of the Sea of Tranquility, he saw a triangular peak he had identified and named during Apollo 8. He turned the air-ground loop on long enough to broadcast the news to Earth.
“I can even see Mount Marilyn,” he said.
Who knows, maybe the TV reporters would pick up on the reference and decide it was worth a mention. If they did, it just might reach Marilyn Lovell, sitting in her family room hoping the burn would get her husband home.
Back in the control room, Gene Kranz and his White Team had taken over
again. It would be their job to shepherd the crew through the burn. Dozens of people had wandered in for the event—controllers from the off-duty shifts, the head of NASA and the second-in-command, the crew that was scheduled for the next Apollo mission. About five minutes before the burn, Kranz went around the room and checked with each controller in turn. All systems looked good.
“Jim, you are GO for the burn,” said Brand.
“Roger, I understand,” said Lovell. “GO for the burn.”
“One minute,” Brand reported.
“Roger.”
The astronauts felt the LEM’s engines light behind them, and the ship edged forward. The acceleration pushed them toward the floor, and for the first time in three days of zero gravity, they felt like their bodies had weight.
“We’re burning 40 percent,” Lovell reported.
“Houston copies.”
“One hundred percent,” Lovell said.
The engine roared behind the ship.
“Aquarius, you were looking good at two minutes,” said Brand. “Still looking good.”
“Two minutes. Roger.”
Three hundred miles an hour faster and still accelerating.
“Aquarius, you’re GO at three minutes.”
“Aquarius. Roger.”
At exactly 4 minutes 15 seconds, the computer shut the engine down.
“Shutdown,” Lovell announced.
“Roger, shutdown,” said Brand.
Thirty seconds later, the verdict was in. They were on course and headed for a landing in the Pacific Ocean in 63 hours.
“Good burn, Aquarius,” Brand said. Lovell couldn’t hear or see the reaction in Houston, but all around Brand controllers were applauding and slapping one another on the back.
Lovell barely took a deep breath. He had slept only one hour in the last day and a half, but neither rest nor celebration were the first things on his mind.
