by Jay Barbree
When the astronauts emerged from the moon’s far side, they resumed communications with CapCom and were told to prepare for a long burn of Aquarius’s engine. That moment would come two hours and six thousand miles away from the moon, and they needed every minute to guarantee the accuracy of their guidance system.
On any other flight, proper guidance and alignment would have been confirmed by using a space sextant to sight a suitable navigation star and feed data into the computer, which would verify that all was set to fire the engine. But Apollo 13 was on its way home in the midst of a huge cloud of explosion debris that orbited the damaged spacecraft, reflecting sunlight and creating a field of “false” stars, making it almost impossible for the astronauts to align the sextant. They were desperate to find an astronavigation fix that would allow them to determine the precise corridor for reentry.
If a star wasn’t available, Lovell figured, why not sight on the nearest star—our sun? It worked.
Right on schedule Lovell fired off the engine. For five minutes he ran the Apollo 13 on manual control. The automatic firing system couldn’t be trusted at this point because of diminished power. Not to worry. Lovell blasted the service module, the command module, and the lunar module assembly perfectly on the desired course.
Jim Lovell’s mother once said, “My Jimmy could fly a box if they put wings on it.” Damn if he couldn’t. The crippled spacecraft was now firmly on its homebound path and it chugged on, another milestone behind them. The odds for survival and successful reentry looked better and better.
Except they were running out of water. Apollo 13’s systems generated tremendous heat and demanded steady cooling. That cooling came from the water supply. Haise quickly calculated that they’d run out of coolant five hours before beginning reentry. Apollo’s systems would overheat and fail just at the time they needed them most.
Haise knew his ship intimately. He told Lovell they would run out of coolant water 151 hours into their flight. The crew recognized that with computers and guidance platforms overheating they would not survive.
Recalling earlier Apollo missions, Haise suddenly remembered that Apollo 11 had not sent its LM ascent stage crashing into the lunar landscape but had left it in orbit to send back telemeter data to Houston. Eleven’s ascent-stage guidance system had survived nearly eight hours without water coolant before it began to fail. This fact gave Apollo 13 a solution to the dilemma of how to provide coolant water for those last five hours before reentry. Knowing the systems would work up to seven or eight hours without coolant meant that for the five-hour period they were without coolant their systems wouldn’t fry. They could make it all the way with a precariously thin but acceptable margin of survival.
To be safe, Lovell decided to put the crew on strict personal water rationing of six ounces a day. Under ordinary space conditions an astronaut loses his thirst for water and dehydration can become a serious problem, but Lovell decided that for the trek home the risk could be set aside.
They were still far from being out of the woods. As soon as the critical engine burns and maneuvers ended and they had worked on the schedule for regenerating their cabin breathing air, the astronauts addressed another critical problem. Exposed directly to solar radiation, Apollo 13’s surface temperature soared to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, while on the opposite or dark side of the ship; temperature plunged to more than 200 degrees below zero. Odyssey and Aquarius were blazing hot on one side, frozen on the other, and the astronauts lacked the electrical power to warm the interior of their lifeboat. They welcomed sunlight as it streamed into the ships, but it was more bright than warm. Without fans constantly moving the air around the two vessels, moisture increased. Walls perspired steadily, and thickened as accumulating moisture enveloped them. Windows looked as if a rainstorm had lashed the ship from inside. Temperatures dropped steadily, and the astronauts shivered in a craft heated to only six degrees above freezing. Jack Swigert suffered especially from the wet cold. The moisture soaked his feet, and he lacked the protection provided Lovell and Haise by their lunar walking boots.
The astronauts were unable to don their spacesuits because of the limited space in the capsule, which was not much larger than a telephone booth. Their Teflon coveralls turned slimy and freezing to the touch. They longed for some thermal underwear.
Cold and wet and drifting for hours in the battered and crippled spacecraft, the astronauts experienced unexpected loneliness. In Mission Control, Deke Slayton, Alan Shepard, and the rest of the team felt growing concern for the emotional states of the crew.
The men were sleeping only in short snatches. Their weariness became evident in their voices and what they said. “Those guys are worn out, they’re hungry, eating only cold food, they’re sucking water rations, they’re cold and wet, and they’re dehydrated, and they don’t know for certain whether they’ll even get back alive,” Deke said, summing up the problem. “On top of that they’re not sleeping. We’ve got to get them to rest. If they don’t sleep, they’ll move into the slot for reentry when they’re not at their best to handle their controls and systems. That’s two days ahead of us.”
Jim Lovell couldn’t have agreed more. He described the situation in space as “three men cold as frogs in a frozen pond.”
It was time to break the rules, which stipulated that, with the exception of special cases, only CapCom could communicate between Houston and a space-borne crew.
“This is sure as hell one of those times,” Deke told the controllers around him. “My judgment is we’re gonna get ’em home safe, but only if they’re alert, if they can handle the final critical hours. They’ve gotta sleep.”
Deke moved into the CapCom’s chair. “Hey, guys, this is Deke,” he began. “Just wanted to let you know we’re gonna get you back. Everything’s looking good. We think you guys are in good shape all the way around. Why don’t you quit worrying and get some sleep?”
This was their boss talking. The man they trusted implicitly. Deke’s personal call eased tension, took away the sense of being utterly remote, and removed some of the uncertainty.
“We think that’s a pretty good idea,” Lovell replied, and those in Mission Control smiled. They knew Deke’s direct involvement would do the trick. Soon all three astronauts were fast asleep, performing a function as vital as breathing and eating.
When they awoke, it was to face a new and potentially lethal problem.
Odyssey and Aquarius were towing the heavy mass of the now-useless service module. The old pros judged it safest to keep the service section attached to protect the heat shield of the command ship from the cold, which could make it brittle and subject to cracking under severe reentry heat.
A problem arose because the wreckage of the service module, a shattered mass of wires and plumbing was still venting small amounts of gas. The escaping gas gently imparted a thrust that gradually pushed Apollo 13 out of the perfect corridor into which it had fired earlier. The astronauts were no longer headed for the intended splashdown target in the Pacific Ocean. Alarmed trackers warned that without another engine burn on an exact alignment, Apollo would streak along the upper heights of earth’s atmosphere, gain a lifting force from the maneuver, and literally skip off and away from the planet. The danger of being left in perpetual orbit was real.
But could the overtaxed LM engine fire again with perfection? They had no choice but to try. Mission Control worked out the numbers, and the ship’s commander fired the engine for only several seconds. That was enough. Lovell was pleased with what he had done. It was perfect. Apollo 13 skidded back into the center of the homeward highway.
The three astronauts were unaware they had become the center of attention for almost the entire planet. More than a billion people listened avidly to every scrap of news about the extraordinary effort to save three men in a disabled spaceship far from home. People filled religious centers as the world gathered to pray for Lovell, Haise, and Swigert. NASA announced the splashdown target as near American Samoa. There the
aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima waited to recover the crew and their spacecraft. But in the event the crippled Odyssey landed off target, British warships, a French aircraft carrier, and Soviet whalers drove voluntarily at flank speed to broaden the potential recovery area.
Apollo 13 accelerated steadily under the gravitational tug of the earth. Jack Swigert roused himself from a night of “rotten sleep” and floated forward from Aquarius to start the “reincarnation” of the Odyssey command module. He drifted into what had been a familiar spaceship cabin, now transformed into a cold and clammy tin can. Everything was covered or soaked in moisture. His immediate fear was that water had seeped into electrical harnesses and circuits. Alert to the possibility of sudden arcing and fire, he moved switches to return life to his ship.
As Deke Slayton had said long before this moment, the knowledge gained from the Apollo 1 launch pad fire that had taken the lives of Grissom, White, and Chaffee was the best insurance for future crews and flights. Despite the moisture in Odyssey, the vessel came to life immediately and without incident.
Finally, with the ship stirring like an awakening dormant robot, he switched on the three batteries essential for reentry. Two were fully charged; one was weak. Swigert went back to the LM, returning quickly with a long cable, and recharged the weak battery from Aquarius’s power supply.
Fred Haise got on the radio with Houston. “What are you guys reading for cabin temperature in the command module?”
“We’re reading forty-five to forty-six degrees,” CapCom replied.
“Now you see why we call it a refrigerator.”
“Uh-huh. Sounds like it’s kind of a cold winter day up there. Is it snowing in the command module yet?”
“No,” Haise grinned. “Not yet.”
“You’ll have some time on the beach in Samoa to thaw out after this cold experience.”
“Sounds great.”
It was a tension-relieving exchange as the astronauts slipped into the final hours. Early on Friday morning, April 17, just slightly more than five hours before predicted splashdown, Lovell fired Aquarius’ small steering jets, hoping to improve his landing-target accuracy.
An hour later, Swigert threw a switch that ignited explosive charges. The battered service module separated. Lovell quickly fired the LM’s jets for maximum separation from the service section to prevent a possible collision as both craft rushed earthward. Lovell had time to look at the service module and snap several photographs as it drifted away. The force of the explosion days before shocked the astronauts. “There’s one whole side of the spacecraft missing,” Lovell reported. “The whole panel is blown out almost from the base of the engine . . . it’s really a mess.”
Three hours later, just one hour from punching into atmosphere, fifteen thousand miles above earth and well into an accelerating dive toward the planet, Lovell and Haise moved into the restored Odyssey. They closed the double hatches of the connecting tunnel, triple-checked the seals, and pressurized the tunnel. They fired charges to separate their lifeboat. The pressurized tunnel added impetus to the separation. Just as advertised, they notified Houston, Aquarius popped away like a champagne cork.
“LM is jettisoned,” Swigert confirmed.
“Farewell, Aquarius, and we thank you,” CapCom called back in a salute to the faithful craft with the spidery legs.
“She was a good ship,” Lovell said with deep emotion.
Four hundred thousand feet high, the command module Odyssey plowed into the atmosphere at better than 24,500 miles an hour. The three astronauts felt the first pressure of deceleration, the opening touches of gravity force.
Suddenly, it rained inside the command module.
The astonished astronauts looked about them. As gravity forces built up, water droplets covering the interior of Odyssey broke free in a sudden shower, collecting along the bottom of the spaceship.
Then Apollo 13 was deep in the fiery heat of reentry. For three minutes the ship was encased in heat of more than five thousand degrees. The ionized sheath forming about the plunging cone shape cut off all communications.
The world waited fretfully.
Clocks seemed to slow to a maddening crawl.
Mission Control was silent.
Squawk boxes crackled. A tracking aircraft over the Pacific Ocean was on-line. It had picked up a radio signal from Odyssey. No one cheered, not yet. Everyone had the same question: What about the parachutes?
Apollo 13 descended through a cloud deck two thousand feet above the Pacific, suspended beneath its three, huge, orange-and-white chutes. Mission Control, watching on television, went mad with relief, applause, cheering. Those in the trenches burst into tears of joy, hugged one another, pounded backs and shoulders.
Incredibly, Thirteen splashed down in the most accurate landing of all the Apollo missions to date. The Iwo Jima was just three miles away. The astronauts deployed flotation bags and assured the recovery ship and the world they were safe and sound.
As they were lifted by helicopter from rafts onto the Iwo Jima deck, sailors cheered, and the carrier’s band swept into a rousing rendition of the most fitting of all musical tributes—“The Age of Aquarius.”
Medical teams hurried the astronauts into sickbay for immediate inspection. There was less of the three men now than at the time they had begun their cliffhanging ride through the void. Among them the crew had lost nearly thirty-two pounds in the six days of their voyage, and Fred Haise was suffering from a mild urinary tract infection. Otherwise, considering all they’d been through, they were in good physical condition.
For a while it seemed the cheering and applause, the clamor of church bells, honking of horns, blasts of ships’ whistles had become a single lifting strain echoing across the planet.
President Richard Nixon made a singularly touching and pertinent comment, which seemed to capture it all in one sentence. “You reached the hearts of millions of people by what you did,” he told the crew of Apollo 13.
Jim Lovell had his own conclusion. “Our mission was a failure,” he judged, “but I like to think it was a successful failure.”
A touch of humor is always a fitting end to a cliffhanger. It was best expressed by the Grumman Aircraft Company, which had produced the lunar module.
Grumman sent a bill for more than four hundred thousand dollars to North American Rockwell, a “towing fee” for dragging the command and service modules through space for a distance of more than three hundred thousand miles.
A single message came from the public at large: Well done!
Alan Shepard knew that the nearly fatal flight of Apollo 13 would delay his own upcoming mission to the moon. There could be no other way. Every facet of the design, construction, and functioning of the service module would need to undergo inspection, review, and design improvement.
But Apollo 14 would fly, and he would command the all-out effort to perform the mission as a full-blown and meaningful scientific study and exploration of the moon.
As darkness fell over his neighborhood after his world settled back to normal crises and problems, and as the three men of Apollo 13 reunited with their families, Alan left his home for a long walk alone in the warm spring night. He moved beneath trees and through winding paths, which eased his troubled thoughts.
Years before, the first Russian manned space flights had mocked America’s stumbling efforts to ascend to earth orbit. Alan was to have led the way as the first man in space, but the stumbling blocks then had been weak minds and political jockeying, not the reliability of the rockets to be flown, and he had had to settle for being the first American in space.
He had been called upon then to save the manned spacecraft program from the myopic vultures in Washington, who were so eager to quit in the face of what they judged to be Russian superiority that could never be matched, let alone exceeded.
Though the three astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 had been safely returned to earth, Washington opponents of NASA regarded the mission as a clear failure and an
unjustified and inexcusable waste of nearly four hundred million dollars of taxpayers’ money. They were ready to shut down the expensive missions to the moon.
Alan Shepard had more than a space flight to make. He now carried the full burden of resurrecting the Apollo program, of reviving America’s confidence and support for future trips to the moon. If his mission succeeded, he would share the accolades with everyone involved in the program.
If Apollo 14 failed, he alone would bear the burden.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Apollo 14: All or Nothing
DEKE SLAYTON TOOK THE LONG elevator ride to launch pad 39’s “penthouse” nearly four hundred feet above ground level. He rose vertically in a steel cage through lights of varying colors and intensity, flashing past steel beams, thick cables, and work platforms.
The elevator swayed and rang with metallic sounds and then stopped. Deke stepped through the gate onto a railed catwalk spanning the precipitous drop toward a massive steel platform far below. He moved along the walk, halting as a strong ocean breeze forced him to grip the guardrail for support. He felt the catwalk sway beneath him. The effect was strange and a bit discomforting—this mountain of steel so enormous and massive, quivering as if it were balanced on springs. The catwalk stretched before him like a long arm. In a few hours it would swing to one side, pulling away from Apollo 14’s monstrous Saturn V rocket.
But that moment wouldn’t come until the crew was on board. Not until the final countdown, which would begin forty-three minutes before the five most powerful rocket engines ever built would ignite. Deke Slayton had knots in his stomach. Soon his friend and two other astronauts he knew well would traverse the same catwalk to enter the command module named Kitty Hawk, the ship that would carry them to the moon. Blazing fire and pounding thunder would send Alan Shepard and his crew away from earth at nearly fifty times the speed of a pistol bullet. It was almost beyond comprehension that men could hurdle away from their world at so blinding a speed.
