Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha

by Harvey Rachlin

  Apollo 13 is launched from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, at the Kennedy Space Center at 1:13 P.M. (CST) on April 11, 1970. Little did the space vehicle's astronauts--James A. Lovell, commander; John Swigert, command module pilot; and Fred Haise, lunar pilot--know what was in store for them, but soon the whole world would be following their dramatic flight.

  But then forty minutes later, when the fans for oxygen tank number two were routinely turned on, the tank’s oxygen quantity reading zoomed from normal to “off-scale high.” Within the next few hours the crew turned on the fans twice more, still obtaining “off-scale high” readings, then rested. In the meantime, the ground crew at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston had observed a malfunction in hydrogen tank number one, and, almost fifty-six hours after Apollo 13’s launch, asked the astronauts to activate the fans and heaters of the cryogenic systems. At this time Apollo 13 was about 200,000 miles from earth.

  The fans for oxygen tank number two were turned on, and the tank’s pressure began to rise as the stabilization-control system signaled a power transient. The tank’s pressure reached its maximum, then jumped to “off-scale high” again. Then it started to decrease, and seconds later its temperature plunged to “off-scale low.” The master caution and warning alarm sounded, signaling an electrical problem. Oxygen flow to fuel cells one and three began decreasing, then ceased. Then there was a rise in temperature of the service propulsion-system helium tank. At 9:07 P.M. CST on Monday, April 13, there was a loud bang on board Apollo 13.

  James Lovell, in the lower equipment bay, and Jack Swigert, in the left seat of the command module, thought the bang they heard was just a joke played by Fred Haise, who had previously moved a valve that had triggered a similar rumble. But Haise was innocent of any horseplay, and he quickly assured Lovell and Swigert that the explosion they had heard and felt was no joke.

  The crew observed that the voltage on DC main bus B was low and realized they were in trouble. “Okay, Houston,” Jack Swigert announced to ground control. “We’ve had a problem here.” “Say again?” responded CapCom Jack Lousma, and this time Lovell reported, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here. We’ve had a main B bus undervolt.”

  The explosion had emanated from liquid-oxygen tank number two. As would later be determined in more detail, combustion had caused the tank, which supplied oxygen to the fuel cells that powered the command and service modules, to fail. But for now, the spacecraft, the mission—and indeed the astronauts—were in a state of crisis. Oxygen tank number one was out. The command module had no power, the service module was dead, and only the lunar module was operational. The spacecraft was more than eighty-five hours from earth, and the backup battery in the command module offered a maximum life of only ten hours—and that had to be preserved for reentry to earth to supply power to the command module’s reentry computers.

  With the mission aborted, a decision had to be made about how Apollo 13 would return home. One option was simply to turn the spacecraft right around and head back, but that would have consumed too much fuel. The method finally chosen was fraught with danger; if not carried out correctly, it could have meant the demise of the spacecraft’s passengers.

  An hour after the explosion, Mission Control announced to the Apollo 13 crew, “We are starting to think about the LM lifeboat.” The use of a lunar module in an emergency had for years been considered, but implementing it in such dire circumstances required the examination of previous studies. With the command module running out of power, a plan had to be settled on soon.

  It was decided that the Apollo 13 crew would try to come home using the lunar module as a lifeboat. The astronauts would leave the command module for the lunar module, where they would navigate the spacecraft around the moon, then use the moon’s gravitational pull to increase their speed and hurtle them back toward earth. At some point the earth’s gravity would grab them and pull them back in, and the command module would be used for the final approach to earth. In theory it was plausible, but would it actually work?

  According to the laws of physics, it could. With Apollo 13 continuing toward the moon, at some point the gravitational pull of the moon would start to take over, sending the spacecraft around the back of the moon. The spacecraft would be caught in a kind of whirlpool, but at a proper point in its lunar orbit, the lunar module would fire its rockets to escape the moon’s gravitational pull and slingshot the craft toward earth. From this point, the vessel would pretty much be on cruise control, building up speed as it headed home. It was important that Apollo 13 hit the earth’s atmosphere at exactly the right angle; if it came in too shallow it would skip off the earth’s atmosphere and go into an eternal orbit around the earth, and if it came in too steep it would burn up as soon as it entered the atmosphere.

  With such a small margin for error, the flight had to be planned precisely. There were several obstacles. With Aquarius, whose mass and center of gravity differed from the command module, driving the entire spacecraft, corrections in the course had to be calculated and effected. The velocity of the craft had to be increased using Aquarius’s descent engine, an operation it was not designed to handle. And simply trying to stay alive inside the spacecraft was becoming a greater challenge as the consumables (chiefly oxygen and water) were being depleted and the temperature inside the cabin was dropping by the minute.

  As Odyssey is kept afloat in the South Pacific Ocean after it splashed down at 12:07 P.M. (CST) on April 17, 1970, astronaut John L. Swigert is lifted in a Billy Pugh net to a helicopter, where Fred W. Haise has already been taken. James Lovell waits in a life raft with a U.S. Navy underwater demolition swimmer, while other navy team swimmers involved in the recovery operation are in the water.

  Indeed, Aquarius, with its limited power and air, wasn’t made for such an excursion. Its engines were designed for the ascent and descent of the lunar module. It was like taking a car designed to drive on city streets and trying to drive it over rocky mountains. But the principles were there. If a truck could be driven through mountainous terrain, a car ought to be able to as well, even though that had not been its intended use, and even if it had never been tried before. But the bottom line was that there really wasn’t much of a choice. It was either that or lose the crew.

  Many of the potential problems of such a lunar-module excursion were addressed by members of the Mission Control team, who called in specialists from the companies that had participated in the manufacture of the various systems aboard Apollo 13. They used computers and simulators to conduct tests and maneuvers, and the results of these were used to guide the space-traveling astronauts. The ground crew investigated numerous trouble areas, and astronauts at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center ran emergency tests in lunar-module simulators.

  The lunar module was the “lifeboat” for most of the trip back to earth. It supplied oxygen and power, and the astronauts worked in there and even rested there. Because of the conservation of power, the men found it too cold to sleep in the command module, but though Aquarius was warmer, at 38 degrees Fahrenheit it was still cold, and Mission Control was concerned that this would prevent the astronauts from getting the rest they needed to handle the tricky navigation of the craft. But the astronauts held up, and so did Aquarius.

  As the three astronauts worked their way out of their cosmic dilemma, the world beneath them watched closely, following every scrap of news broadcast about the crew. A dozen countries offered to help in recovering the landed spacecraft. People all over the globe prayed for the successful return of the astronauts, then glued themselves to their television sets to watch coverage of the flight.

  Odyssey, the Apollo 13 command module, is set down by a cable on the USS Iwo Jima in the South Pacific.

  Meanwhile Apollo 13, having been whipped out of lunar orbit, was hurtling back toward earth. All the systems on board the command module had been shut down save those for life support and communication, and its power consumption was lowered to enable it to susta
in its occupants. Because the lunar module had no heat shield, the landing would have to take place in the command module. More than four hours before the spacecraft would reenter the earth’s atmosphere, with Lovell and Haise in the lunar module, Swigert jettisoned the damaged service module. As the service module drifted away the crew got their first look at the damage it incurred in the explosion. Due to the extent of the damage questions were raised as to whether the explosion had caused structural damage to the heat shield; if it had been damaged the ship could burn up during reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. The answer would not be known until reentry.

  About ninety minutes before reentry the astronauts got back into the command module, and the lunar module, the astronauts’ deliverer and savior, was ejected. Mission Control bade farewell to Aquarius, as did the astronauts. It was up to Odyssey now to deliver the Apollo 13 crew safely back to earth.

  Shortly after noon CST on Friday, April 17, nearly eighty-seven harrowing hours after the accident and after more than five days and twenty-two hours in space in total, the three parachutes of Odyssey opened, permitting the craft with the three astronauts aboard to gracefully drop into the Pacific Ocean. Instead of being doomed to endless orbit in outer space, Odyssey—with its precious human cargo—was home again.

  And so Odyssey lives on,* a shrine to the valor of the men and women who participated, in space and on the ground, in Apollo 13’s mission, and a grand testament to the fact that while the journey to the cosmos may be fraught with danger, the unbridled spirit and boundless ingenuity of human beings can overcome even the most formidable of obstacles.

  LOCATION: Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, Hutchinson, Kansas.*

  Footnotes

  *In the 1960s and early 1970s, after command modules returned to earth, they would routinely, for budgetary reasons, be gutted so that their parts could be installed in other spacecraft to reduce costs. Odyssey was likewise stripped of its parts, and when it arrived at its current home in Kansas, staff members devoted much time to locating its lost hardware. Many interesting tales attend the recovery of the parts, including the long search for one of Odyssey’s major control panels, which ended only when it was found and identified by its serial number in one of the holding institution’s own exhibit crafts.

  *Odyssey is on permanent loan to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, which has in its collection from the Apollo 13 flight the astronauts’ space suits, a parachute, photographic equipment and accessories, a slide rule, the astronauts’ chronographs, and a microform Bible that one of the astronauts brought on board.

  THE GUN THAT KILLED JOHN

  LENNON

  DATE: 1980.

  WHAT IT IS: A .38-caliber special Charter Arms Undercover revolver used in pop music’s most famous assassination.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The Lennon murder weapon has a 2-inch barrel and a 5-chambered cylinder. It is a “blued” gun—bluing is a process in which a preservative coating is put over the metal to keep it from rusting—that appears to have a black finish. The serial number inscribed on the gun is 577570.

  The 8th of December 1980 was a mild winter day in New York City, the temperature dropping into the fifties as darkness descended. Midtown Manhattan was alive and vibrant, as it typically is on a weekday night, with traffic navigating the crowded thoroughfares and pedestrians briskly negotiating the sidewalks. Neon lights flickered over Broadway, skyscrapers stretched to the heavens along the Avenue of the Americas, stately apartment buildings presided over Park Avenue, and trendy restaurants and boutiques graced the fashionable West Side. Below ground, long subway trains clattered through the dark serpentine tunnels, their passengers perhaps a little wary of the dangers of night travel in the city’s subterranean trenches.

  On West Forty-fourth Street, in the heart of the theater district, a couple left the Record Plant recording studio and climbed into a limousine. A glut of long black cars routinely clogged the streets in Gotham, ferrying the wealthy, the famous, and those who wanted to impart these images, but this particular limo harbored two world-renowned passengers. He was a rock star, one of the most idolized persons in the world, the erstwhile co-creative force of what many considered the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time. A towering figure, the man was a widely acclaimed musical genius, an artist with sublime musical and lyrical gifts, a poet, a peace activist, and a thinking person’s renegade—not to mention the world’s most famous former full-time househusband. Although personal and professional rifts were given as the underlying reasons, his wife had been vilified as the dragon lady who had catalyzed the sundering of the iconographic Sixties music group, which had bestowed on the world a catalog of tunes that not only changed the face of the popular music scene, but which ushered in a whole cultural shift. The Beatles were not only the most inventive, most celebrated, and most successful pop musical group in the history of the music industry, but they spawned a revolution that reverberated for decades, perhaps permanently changing the sociological and cultural tapestry of civilized society.

  Together the two limo passengers, husband and wife John Lennon and Yoko Ono, were a pop-music duo in their own right, having released several recordings since their controversial 1968 album Two Virgins, whose front and back covers were graced by photographs of their fully naked bodies.

  The husband-and-wife music team had been working at the Record Plant on a song for a planned new album. This project was part of Lennon’s musical rebirth since the birth of his and Ono’s son, Sean, in 1975, after which the ex-Beatle Lennon decided to take the radical step of becoming a full-time father and nurturer to his newborn child. With his substantial earnings from his days as a Beatle, as well as the vast self-perpetuating royalties earned daily for radio airplay of the songs he wrote and of repackaged Beatles records, money would not be a problem for the wealthy Lennons in their New York City digs.

  An English expatriate, John Lennon had had to fight to make America his home, after initially being denied permanent residence because of an earlier drug conviction in England, but finally he became a legal resident of New York City.

  From the late 1950s, Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison had been members of a musical group, eventually known as the Beatles. The band built up local followings in Hamburg, Germany, where they played on several visits, and in their hometown of Liverpool, England. In 1961, a record-store proprietor named Brian Epstein heard the band play and got them a contract with the Parlophone label of EMI. There were a couple of early personnel changes, and the band soon became famous as the foursome of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Ringo Starr (born Richard Star key, Jr.).

  In October 1962 the Beatles hit the English charts with “Love Me Do,” followed a few months later by “Please Please Me.” But the Beatles hadn’t caught on yet in the United States, the world’s largest record market, because EMI’s American subsidiary, Capitol Records, had no faith in the combo’s commercial potential in America.

  Despite Capitol’s refusal to release the Beatles’ records, Epstein himself traveled to America to play for an East Coast Capitol chief a dub of the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which generated a lot of excitement. On February 1, 1964, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” reached the top position on the U.S. singles chart, followed in the next few months by “She Loves You,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Love Me Do,” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” (Not only were all these songs written by Lennon and McCartney, but the pair even had another number-one tune as writers during this time with Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love.”) By now, Beatlemania had grabbed the world and was changing the face of the music scene.

  Lennon and McCartney wrote the Beatles tunes and sang the lead vocals on most of them as well. They created infectious melodies and married lyrics to them that could be fun, ponderous, silly, provocative, romantic, cryptic, optimistic, pessimistic.

  As the Sixties wound through their critical social upheavals
with the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Vietnam War, the Beatles not only supplied the musical sound track, but led the revolution with their faddish hairstyles and attire and their maverick attitudes on everything from religion and philosophy to sex and politics. The Sixties were a time of psychedelic drugs, sexual liberation, mysticism, antiwar demonstrations, and rabid environmentalism. John Lennon was perhaps the most progressive Beatle, the experimenter, the articulate spokesperson, the elder statesman of the Fab Four. Even though they had stopped touring in 1966 and produced music only on vinyl from that point on, millions of Beatles fans worldwide received the news of their breakup, announced by Paul McCartney in April 1970, with immense disappointment, and the Japanese artist Yoko Ono was fingered by some as the culprit. But Lennon had found his soul mate in Ono, his second wife.

  As Lennon and Ono cruised uptown in their limo, a deranged fan waited at their destination. The limousine pulled up to the Dakota at Central Park West and Seventy-second Street, the home of its passengers. The massive yellowish stone building with castle-like turrets was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence topped with a long row of truculent sculpted male heads. At the entrance was an imposing arched stone gate that opened into the building’s large interior courtyard. A small guardhouse stood in front of the gate on the right-hand side, from which security personnel could keep watch over the driveway into the courtyard and the twin walkways that bordered it.

  John Lennon and Yoko Ono got out of their limousine and were about to step onto the right-hand walkway when the armed intruder emerged from the shadows of the arched entrance. Earlier in the day the stocky, bespectacled man had asked John Lennon for his autograph, which the rock star had willingly scribbled on the cover of his recently released album, Double Fantasy. Now the interloper called out.