Lovell, Swigert, and Haise could not hear Kranz’s speech, but at the moment they didn’t need to be told to keep cool. The moon landing was definitely off, but beyond that, they were probably in no imminent danger. As Kranz had pointed out, fuel cell two was fine. As the crew and controllers knew, oxygen tank one was healthy as well. Not for nothing did NASA design its ships with backup system after backup system. A spacecraft with one cell and one tank of air might not be fit to take you to Fra Mauro, but it was surely fit to take you back to Earth.
Lovell checked the readings for his remaining oxygen tank. Lovell:
The commander glanced at the meter and froze: the quantity needle for tank one was well below full and visibly falling, As Lovell watched, almost entranced, he could see it easing downward in an eerie, slow-motion slide. Lovell was put in mind of a needle on a car’s gas gauge. Funny how you can never actually see the thing budge; funny how it always seems frozen in place, but nevertheless makes its way down to empty. This needle, though, was decidedly on the move.
This discovery, horrifying as it was, explained a lot. Whatever it was that had happened to tank two, that event was over. The tank had gone off line or blown its top or cracked a seam or something, but beyond the very fact of its absence, it had ceased to be a factor in the functioning of the ship. Tank one, however, was still in a slow leak. Its contents were obviously streaming into space, and the force of the leak was no doubt what was responsible for the out-of-control motion of the ship. It was nice to know that when the needle finally reached zero, Odyssey’s oscillations would at last disappear. The downside, of course, was that so would its ability to sustain the life of the crew.
Lovell knew Houston would have to be alerted. The change in pressure was subtle enough that perhaps the controllers hadn’t noticed it yet. The best way – the pilot’s instinctive way – was to play it down, keep it casual. Hey you guys, notice anything about that other tank? Lovell nudged Swigert, pointed to the tank one meter, then pointed to his microphone. Swigert nodded.
“Jack,” the command module pilot asked quietly, “are you copying O2 tank one cryo pressure?”
There was a pause. Maybe Lousma looked at Liebergot’s monitor, maybe Liebergot told him off the loop. Maybe he even knew already. “That’s affirmative,” the Capcom said.
As near as Lovell could tell, it would be a while before the ship’s endgame would play out. He had no way of calculating the leak rate in the tank, but if the moving needle was any indication, he had a couple of hours at least before the 320 pounds of oxygen were gone. When the tank gasped its last, the only air and electricity left on board would come from a trio of compact batteries and a single, small oxygen tank. These were intended to be used at the very end of the flight, when the command module would be separated from the service module and would still need a few bursts of power and a few puffs of air to see it through reentry. The little tank and the batteries could run for just a couple of hours. Combining this with what was left in the hissing oxygen tank, Odyssey alone could keep the crew alive until sometime between midnight and 3 a.m. Houston time. It was now a little after 10 p.m.
But Odyssey wasn’t alone. Attached to its nose was the hale and hearty, fat and fueled Aquarius, an Aquarius with no leaks, no gas clouds. An Aquarius that could hold and sustain two men comfortably, and in a pinch, three men with some jostling. No matter what happened to Odyssey, Aquarius could protect the crew. For a little while, anyway. From this point in space, Lovell knew, a return to Earth would take about one hundred hours. The LEM had enough air and power only for the forty-five or so hours it would have taken to descend to the surface of the moon, stay there for a day and a half, and fly back up for a rendezvous with Odyssey. And that air and power would last forty-five hours only if there were two men aboard; put another passenger inside and you cut that time down considerably. Water on the lander was similarly limited.
But Lovell realized that for the moment Aquarius might offer the only option. He looked across the cabin at Fred Haise, his lunar module pilot. Of the three of them, it was Haise who knew the LEM best, who had trained in it the longest, who would be able to coax the most out of its limited resources.
“If we’re going to get home,” Lovell said to his crewman, “we’re going to have to use Aquarius.”
Back on the ground, Liebergot had discovered the falling pressure in tank one at about the same time Lovell did. Unlike the commander of the mission, the EECOM, sitting at the safe remove of a control room in Houston, was not yet prepared to give up on his spacecraft, but he did not hold out great hopes for it either. Liebergot turned to his right, where Bob Heselmeyer, the environmental control officer for the LEM, sat. At this moment, the EECOM and his lunar module counterpart could not have been in more different worlds. They were both working the same mission, both struggling with the same crisis, yet Liebergot was looking out from the abyss of a console full of blinking lights and sickly data, while Heselmeyer was monitoring a slumbering Aquarius beaming home not a single worrisome reading.
Liebergot glanced almost enviously at Heselmeyer’s perfect little screen with all its perfect little numbers and then looked grimly back at his own console. On either side of the monitor were handles that maintenance technicians used to pull the screen out for repairs and adjustments. Liebergot all at once discovered that for several minutes he had been clutching the handles in a near death grip. He released the handles and shook his arms to restore their circulation but not before noticing that the backs of both his hands had turned a cold, bloodless white.
Mission Control told the crew to shut down the fuel cells to prevent the loss of their oxygen. Lovell:
“Did I hear you right?” Haise, the electrical specialist asked Lousma. “You want me to shut the reac valve on fuel cell three?”
“That’s affirmative,” Lousma answered.
“You want me to go through the whole smash for fuel cell shut-down?”
“That’s affirmative.”
Haise turned to Lovell and nodded sadly. “It’s official,” said the astronaut who until just an hour ago was to have the sixth man on the moon.
“It’s over,” said Lovell, who was to have been the fifth.
“I’m sorry,” said Swigert, who would have overseen the mother ship in lunar orbit while his colleagues walked. “We did everything we could.”
At the EECOM console and in the backroom, Liebergot, Bliss, Sheaks and Brown watched their monitors as the valve in fuel cell three was slammed shut. The numbers for oxygen tank one confirmed their worst fears: the O2 leak continued. Liebergot asked Kranz to order that fuel cell one be shut next. Kranz complied – and the oxygen leak continued.
Liebergot looked away from his screen: the end, he knew, was at last here. Had the explosion or meteor collision or whatever else crippled the ship occurred seven hours earlier or one hour later, it would have been another EECOM on console at the time, another EECOM who would have attended this death watch. But the accident happened 55 hours, 54 minutes, and 53 seconds into the mission, during the last hour of a shift that by sheer scheduling happenstance belonged to Seymour Liebergot. Now Liebergot, through no fault of his own, was about to become the first flight controller in the history of the manned space program to lose the ship that had been placed in his charge, a calamity any controller worked his whole career to avoid. The EECOM turned to his right, toward where Bob Heselmeyer, the LEM’s environmental officer, sat. As Liebergot glanced again at Heselmeyer’s screen, he could not help thinking of that simulation, that terrible simulation which had nearly cost him his job a few weeks earlier.
“Remember,” said Liebergot, “when we were working on those lifeboat procedures?”
Heselmeyer gave him a blank look.
“The LEM lifeboat procedures we worked on in that sim?” Liebergot repeated.
Heselmeyer still stared blankly.
“I think,” said Liebergot, “it’s time we dusted them off.”
The EECOM steeled himself,
signed back on the loop, and called to his flight director.
“Flight, EECOM.”
“Go ahead, EECOM.”
“The pressure in O2 tank one is all the way down to 297,” Liebergot said. “We’d better think about getting into the LEM.”
“Roger, EECOM,” Kranz said. “TELMU and CONTROL, from Flight,” he called to the LEM’s environmental and guidance officers.
“Go, Flight.”
“I want you to get some guys figuring out minimum power needed in the LEM to sustain life.”
“Roger.”
“And I want LEM manning around the clock.”
“Roger that too.”
At the same time this conversation was taking place, Jack Swigert, on the center couch in Odyssey, looked at his instrument panel and discovered that while the oxygen readings might have been grim on the ground, they were downright dire in the spacecraft. Squinting through the growing darkness of his powered-down ship, where the temperature had fallen to a chilly 58 degrees, Swigert saw that his tank one pressure was down to a bare 205 pounds per square inch.
“Houston,” he said, signing back on the air, “it looks like tank one O2 pressure is just a hair over 200. Does it look to you like it’s still going down?”
“It’s slowly going to zero,” Lousma responded. “We’re starting to think about the LEM lifeboat.”
Swigert, Lovell, and Haise exchanged nods. “Yes,” the command module pilot said, “that’s what we’re thinking about too.”
With an OK to abandon ship at last granted by the ground, the crew wasted little time in getting started. Assuming the men were entertaining any hopes of getting home, they could not just take up residence in the LEM and let their fading mother ship sputter to a halt like a car out of gas on a country road. Rather, since Odyssey would have to be used at the end of the flight for re-entry, the ship would have to be shut off one switch or system at a time so as to preserve the operation of all of its instruments and maintain the calibration of their settings. Under ideal conditions, all three men would handle the job; under current conditions, however, Swigert would have to take care of things on his own, because at the same time Odyssey was being taken off line, Aquarius would have to be brought on line, a two-man task that would have to be completed before the command module expired.
Lovell and Haise swam through the lower equipment bay and into the LEM, where they had broadcast their happy travelogue barely two hours earlier. Haise settled into his spot on the right side of the craft and surveyed the blacked out instrument panel. Lovell floated to his station on the left.
Swigert remained in Odyssey, still shutting down its systems, while Lovell and Haise were working in the LEM configuring the systems of the twin spacecraft. Odyssey’s controls had to be powered down before the LEM’s could be powered up. Swigert then joined Lovel and Haise in the LEM.
At Houston the shift changed. Glynn Lunney’s “Black” team took over from Kranz’s “White” team which began working on Apollo 13’s problems: how to bring them back before their resources ran out.
A spacecraft heading for the moon from Earth could take a “free return” trajectory which would take it around the moon and bring it back like a slingshot. But Apollo 13’s current flight path had been altered to allow it to go into lunar orbit so it would need to fire its engines to get onto the free return trajectory. An additional “burn” at PC + 2 would shorten its journey home. PC meant Pericynthion, the closest point to the far side of the moon; PC + 2 was two hours after this point. Lovell:
Of all of the problems Lunney faced, the most complex was the burn. In the hour or so since the astronauts had moved over to Aquarius, no definite decisions had yet been made about how to propel the docked ships toward home, and with the spacecraft moving closer to the moon, at a speed climbing back up to 5,000 miles per hour, the options were quickly fading. A direct abort, if one could even be attempted, got harder and harder the farther the ships got from Earth. A PC + 2 burn, if one was going to be attempted, would take a lot of planning, and the time for pericynthion was closing in fast. It would always be possible to fire the engine after the PC + 2 point, but the earlier in the earthward transit a burn was attempted, the less fuel it would take to affect the trajectory; the longer the burn was delayed, the longer the engine would have to be fired.
Chris Kraft was the former flight director. The control team had been expanded to four teams working in shifts, each team with its own flight director. Kraft was then deputy director of the Space Center. He had just returned to Mission Control from a press conference.
Pacing behind Kranz, who was also pacing, Kraft knew which return route he’d choose. The service propulsion engine, he was certain, was useless. Even if there was some way of mustering enough electricity to get the engine going, Kraft was not convinced that the crippled Odyssey would be able to take the strain. No one knew the condition of the service module, but if the force of the bang had been any indication, it was possible that the sudden application of 22,500 pounds of thrust would collapse the entire back end of the spacecraft, causing both docked ships to tumble ass over tea kettle, sending the crew not back toward Earth but barrel-rolling down to the surface of the moon.
The only way home, Kraft figured, was to use the LEM’s engine – and more important, to use it right away. It would be tomorrow evening before the docked ships first passed behind the shadow of the moon, and it would be close to three hours beyond that before they reached the PC + 2 milestone. Waiting the better part of a day to get the crew on its homeward trajectory seemed nonchalant at best and downright reckless at worst. What Kraft wanted to do was fire the descent engine now, get the ship back on its free-return slingshot course, and when it emerged from behind the moon and reached the PC + 2 point, execute any maneuvers that might be required to refine the trajectory or increase its speed.
In the past, when Chris Kraft had an idea like this, that idea got implemented. Nowadays, though, things were different. It was Gene Kranz who dictated the direction of things, Gene Kranz who was the true capo di tutti capi of the control room. If Chris Kraft wanted something done, he was free to suggest it to Kranz, but he could no longer decree it. In the aisle behind the flight director’s console, Kraft was about to stop Kranz’s pacing and discuss his two-step burn idea when Kranz turned to him.
“Chris,” he said, “I sure as hell don’t trust that service module engine.”
“I don’t either, Gene,” said Kraft.
“I’m not sure we could fire it even if we wanted to.”
“I’m not either.”
“No matter what else we do, I think we’re going to have to go around the moon.”
“Concur,” Kraft said. “When do you want to burn?”
“Well, I don’t want to wait till tomorrow evening,” Kranz said. “How about we try a quick burn for a free return now, get that squared away, and then figure out if we want to speed them up with a PC + 2 tomorrow.”
Kraft nodded. “Gene,” he said after a considerable pause, “I think that’s a good idea.”
Two rows down and one console over, Chuck Deiterich, an off-duty retrofire officer, or RETRO standing behind his accustomed console, and Jerry Bostick, an off-duty flight dynamics officer, or FIDO, could not hear Kranz and Kraft’s discussion, but they knew the options as well as their bosses. Though it was Kraft and Kranz and Lunney who would ultimately decide the ship’s route home, it was Deiterich and Bostick and the other flight dynamics specialists who would have to come up with the protocols to pull the plan off. At the FIDO station, Bostick pushed his microphone out of range of his mouth, and leaned toward Deiterich.
“Chuck,” he said quietly, “How do we all want to do this thing?”
“Jerry,” Deiterich answered, “I don’t know.”
“I assume we’re ruling out Odyssey’s engine.”
“Absolutely.”
“I assume we’re going around the moon.”
“Absolutely.”
“An
d I assume we want to get them on free return as quick as possible.”
“Definitely.”
After a moment Bostick said, “Then I suggest we get our shit together fast.”
Close to a quarter of a million miles away, in the crowded cockpit of Aquarius, the men on whose behalf Bostick and Deiterich would be working had more elemental things on their minds than a return-to-Earth engine burn. Settling into his two-man spacecraft with his three-man crew, Jim Lovell had the chance to look around at the hand circumstance had dealt him. He did not like what he saw.
It was 58 degrees and falling inside the LEM but there was plenty of food because they had enough for a 10-day trip. Lovell:
Lovell tried a pitch-changing maneuvre from the LEM but the centre of gravity of the combined spacecraft made such maneuvres very awkward.
Capcom told Aquarius what they had decided. Lovell:
“Also Aquarius,” the Capcom now said, “we’d like to brief you on what our burn plan is. We’re going to make a free-return maneuver of 16feet per second at 61 hours. Then we’re going to power down to conserve consumables, and at 79 hours we’ll make a PC + 2 burn to kick what we’ve got. We want to get you on the free-return course and powered down as soon as possible, so how do you feel about making a 164 foot-per-second burn in 37 minutes?”
Lovell released the controller, allowed his ships to drift, and turned to his crewmates with a questioning look. Swigert, still at sea in the alien LEM, once again shrugged. Haise, who knew the LEM better than any man on board, responded similarly. Lovell turned his palms upward.
“It’s not like we have any better ideas up here,” he said.
“Do you think 37 minutes is enough?” Haise asked.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 29
