The commander grabbed Haise’s arm, shook it, and pointed. Haise followed Lovell’s finger, saw what his senior pilot saw, and his eyes, too, went wide. From behind Lovell and Haise, Swigert swam frantically down the tunnel holding his Hasselblad.
“And there’s one whole side of that spacecraft missing!” Lovell radioed to Huston.
“Is that right,” Kerwin said.
“Right by the – look out there, would you? Right by the high-gain antenna. The whole panel is blown out, almost from the base to the engine.”
“Copy that,” said Kerwin.
“It looks like it got the engine bell too,” Haise said, shaking Lovell’s arm and pointing to the big funnel protruding from the back of the module. Lovell saw a long, brown burn mark on the conical exhaust port.
“Think it zinged the bell, huh?” Kerwin asked.
“That’s the way it looks. It’s really a mess.”
The next task was to power up Odyssey.
In the cockpit of Aquarius, Lovell looked at Swigert and motioned him to the tunnel. Unlike the reading of the power-up checklist fourteen hours earlier, the execution of the list would be a simple matter, requiring less than half an hour’s work by the command module pilot.
As the first switch was thrown, sending a surge of power through the long, cold wires, Lovell braced for the sickening pop and sizzle indicating that the condensation soaking the instrument panel had indeed found an unprotected switch or junction and shorted the ship right back out. It was a sound he had first heard over the Sea of Japan and one he clearly hoped he would never hear again. But as the power-up cockpit proceeded, Swigert threw his first breaker and his second, and his third, and soon, all the crewmen heard was the reassuring hum and gurgle indicating the spacecraft was coming back to life.
EECOM John Aaron knew that the rute of energy consumption was critical. Lovell:
The way Aaron had ciphered things out, the ship could afford to pull no more than 43 amps of juice if it hoped to stay alive for the full two hours of reentry. But, having won the argument in room 210 over when to turn the telemetry on, he wouldn’t know if he was actually staying within this power budget until the command module was completely powered up and the data started streaming back from the ship. If it turned out that Odyssey was consuming juice above the 43 amp level, even for a short while, there was a real chance its batteries would be exhausted before it ever hit the ocean.
When the readings came back, they showed Odyssey’s power consumption was 2 amps higher than the level which would last. They identified the instruments which were consuming the extra power as being back-up systems which could be shut down. This brought power consumption back to the 43 amp level which would last until splash down. The LEM was now expendable but Haise was in a very bad shape.
“Man,” Lovell muttered, “you are a mess.” Moving behind Haise, the commander wrapped him in a bear hug to share his body heat. At first the gesture seemed to accomplish nothing, but gradually the trembling subsided.
“Fred, why don’t you get upstairs and help Jack out,” Lovell said. “I’ll finish up here.”
Haise nodded and prepared to jump up the tunnel. But before he did, he stopped and took a long look around Aquarius’s cockpit. Impulsively, he pushed back toward his station. Attached to the wall was a large screen of fabric netting used to prevent small items from floating behind the instrument panel. Haise grabbed hold of the netting and gave a sharp pull; it tore free with a ripping sound.
“Souvenir,” he said with a shrug, wadding the netting into a ball, stuffing it into his pocket, and vanishing up the tunnel.
Alone in the lunar module, Lovell too glanced slowly around it. The debris of four days of close-quarters living was collected in the cluttered cockpit, and Aquarius now looked less the intrepid moonship it had been on Monday than a sort of galactic garbage scow. Lovell waded through the scraps of paper and rubbish and moved back toward his window. Before jumping ship himself, he had one more job: steering the twin vehicles to the attitude Jerry Bostick had specified, so the LEM would drop into the deep water off New Zealand.
Lovell took the attitude control for the last time and pushed it to the side. The ship yawed slightly, jostling some of the floating paper. Without the inert mass of the service module skewing the center of gravity so badly, Aquarius was far more maneuverable, much closer to the nimble ship the simulators in Houston and Florida had conditioned Lovell to expect before this mission began. With a few practiced adjustments, he moved the lander to the proper position, then called the ground.
“OK Houston, Aquarius. I’m at the LEM separation attitude.”
“I can’t think of a better idea, Jim,” Kerwin replied.
Lovell finished configuring the LEM’s switches and systems and then, like Haise, decided that a souvenir might be in order. Reaching to the top of his window, he grabbed the optical sight and gave it a twist. It unscrewed easily and Lovell pocketed it. Looking toward the stowage area at the back of the cockpit, he found the helmet he would have worn on the surface of the moon, picked it up, and tucked it under his arm. Finally, he turned to another cabinet and retrieved the plaque he and Haise would have clamped to LEM’s front leg once they had emerged from the lander and begun to explore. None of the workers in NASA’s metal shop who had manufactured the plaque had ever expected to see it again. Now, Lovell reflected, they could stop by his office or den and take a look whenever they chose.
Holding his collected booty, Lovell sprang up the tunnel into Odyssey’s lower equipment bay, stashed his souvenirs in astorage cabinet, and movedinthe directionofthe couches. Instinctively, he moved toward the left-hand station but when he shimmied out of the equipment bay, he discovered that while Haise was buckled into his familiar right-hand seat, Swigert had claimed Lovell’s left-hand spot. It was customary during the descent and reentry phase of a lunar mission for a commander to relinquish his seat to his command module pilot. During a flight in which so many of the critical moments belonged to the commander and the LEM pilot, the man in the center couch was oftentimes overlooked. Reentry, however, when the LEM that had taken his shipmates to the surface of the moon was nothing but a jettisoned memory, was essentially a command module pilot’s operation, and as a gesture of respect for both his competence as a flier and the thankless job he had performed so far, he was usually allowed to bring the ship in for its landing. Now, as reentry approached, and the commander of this mission approached his familiar station, he had to switch course and move back to a less familiar one.
“Reporting aboard, skipper,” Lovell said to Swigert.
“Aye-aye,” Swigert answered, a bit self-consciously. Lovell donned his headset and nodded, then Swigert signed on the air.
“OK, Houston, we’re ready to proceed with hatch close-up.”
“OK, Jack. Did Jim get all of the film out of Aquarius?”
Lovell looked at Swigert and nodded yes.
“Yes,” Swigert said. “That’s affirmative. And we remembered to get Jim out too.”
“Good deal, Jack,” Kerwin said. “Then what we want you to do is seal the hatch and vent the tunnel until you get down to about 3 pounds per square inch. If the hatch holds pressure for a minute or so, you’re OK and you can feel free to release Aquarius.”
“OK,” Swigert said. “Copy that.”
Lovell, indicating to Swigert that he should stay where he was, wriggled back out of his couch and glided toward the lower equipment bay. Swimming into the tunnel, he slammed the LEM’s hatch and sealed it with a turn of its lever. Then he backed into Odyssey, retrieved its hatch from the spot where he had tied it down on that Monday night so long ago, and fitted it into place.
If this hatch evidenced the same balkiness it had four days ago, the LEM could not be jettisoned and the reentry could not proceed as planned. Even if the hatch did seal, it would be a few minutes before the onboard pressure sensors would confirm that the seal was tight and the spacecraft wasn’t leaking air. Naturally, without t
his confirmation, a safe reentry would be impossible. Lovell regarded the hatch suspiciously and then threw its locking mechanism. The latches closed with a satisfying snap. Reaching for the tunnel vent switch, he bled the air out of the passageway and into space until the pressure read 2.8 pounds per square inch. Flipping the vent switch shut, he swam back to his seat.
“Sealed?” Swigert asked.
“I hope so,” Lovell said.
With this tepid reassurance, the command module pilot flipped several switches on his instrument panel and brought the oxygen system to life, feeding fresh O2 into the cockpit. For several taut seconds he stared at his indicator.
“Oh, no,” Swigert groaned.
“What’s wrong?” Lovell and Haise asked, practically in unison.
“Flow is high. It looks like we’ve got a leak.”
On the ground, John Aaron hunched over his EECOM screen and spotted the oxygen rate at the same time Swigert did.
“Oh, no,” he groaned.
“What’s wrong?” Liebergot, Burton, and Dumis asked, practically in unison.
“Flow is high. It looks like we’ve got a leak.”
On the air-to-ground loop, Swigert’s voice called out, “OK Houston, we’ve got an O2 flow high.”
“Roger, Jack,” Kerwin answered. “Let us check it.”
As Swigert kept his eyes on his instruments, Aaron hailed his backroom. He and his engineers muttered on the line about the source of the potential leak while the three other EECOMs in the second row fretted aloud among themselves.
Within minutes, Aaron believed he had the problem sorted out. The LEM operated at a slightly lower pressure than the command module. Over the past four days, with hatches opened up and Odyssey shut off, it was Aquarius which determined the pressure in both ships. When the command module was powered up and its door was closed, the pressure sensors spotted that difference and immediately tried to pump the internal atmosphere up to what they thought it should be. In a few moments, Aaron figured, the necessary air should have been added to the cockpit and the high flow rate would stop.
“Sit tight for another minute,” he said to the people around him. “I think we’ll be all right.”
Forty seconds later, the numbers in the spacecraft and on the EECOM’s screen indeed began to stabilize.
“OK,” Swigert said with audible relief, “it’s dropping now, Joe.”
“Roger,” Kerwin called. “In that case, when you are comfortably ready to release the LEM, you can go ahead and do it.”
Lovell and Swigert looked at the mission timer on their instrument panel. It was 141 hours and 26 minutes into the flight.
“Do it in four minutes?” Swigert asked.
“Seems like a nice round figure,” Lovell answered.
“Houston,” Swigert announced. “We’ll punch off at 141 plus 30.”
Outside the cockpit’s five windows, the astronauts could see nothing of Aqarius but its reflective silver roof plates, just a few feet away from the glass of their portholes. Three and a half minutes elapsed.
“Thirty seconds to LEM jettison,” Swigert said.
“Ten seconds.”
“Five.”
Swigert reached up to the instrument panel, ripped away his “NO” note, and balled it up in his palm.
“Four, three, two, one, zero.”
The command module pilot flipped the toggle switch and all three crewmen heard a dull, almost comical pop. In their windows, the silver roof of the lunar lander began to recede. As it did, its docking tunnel became visible, then its high-gain antenna, then the array of other antennas that bristled from its top like metal weed. Slowly, the unbound Aquarius began a graceful forward somersault.
Lovell stared as the face of the ship – its windows, its attitude-control quads – rolled into view. He could see the forward hatch from which he and Haise would have emerged after settling down in the dust of Fra Mauro. He could see the ledge on which he would have stood while opening his equipment bay before climbing down to the lunar surface. He could see the reflective, almost taunting, nine-rung ladder he would have used to make that final descent. The LEM rolled some more and was now upside down, its four splayed legs pointing up to the stars, the crinkly gold skin of its descent stage shining back at Odyssey.
“Houston, LEM jettison complete,” Swigert announced.
“OK, copy that,” Kerwin said softly. “Farewell, Aquarius, and we thank you.”
Finally, they needed to check their re-entry angle against the moonset attitude.
“Got anything, Jack?” Lovell asked.
“Nothing yet.”
“Now?”
“Negative.”
“Now? Just three seconds left.”
“Not yet,” Swigert answered. Then, at precisely the instant the FIDO in Houston had predicted, the moon dropped a fraction of a degree more and a tiny black nick appeared in its lower edge. Swigert turned to Lovell with a giant grin.
“Moonset,” he said, and clicked on the air. “Houston, attitude checked out OK.”
“Good deal,” said Joe Kerwin.
From the center seat, Jim Lovell turned to look at the men on either side of him and smiled. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we’re about to reenter. I suggest you get ready for a ride.”
Unconsciously, the commander touched his shoulder belts and lap belts, tightening them slightly. Unconsciously, Swigert and Haise copied him.
“Joe, how far out do you show us now?” Swigert asked his Capcom.
“You’re moving at 25,000 miles per hour, and on our plot map board, the ship is so close to Earth we can’t hardly tell you’re out there at all.”
“I know all of us here want to thank all you guys for the very fine job you did,” Swigert said.
“That’s affirm, Joe,” Lovell agreed.
“I’ll tell you,” Kerwin said, “we all had a good time doing it.”
In the spacecraft, the crew fell silent, and on the ground in Houston, a similar stillness fell over the control room. In four minutes, the leading edge of the command module would bite into the upper layer of the atmosphere, and as the accelerating ship encountered the thickening air, friction would begin to build, generating temperatures of 5,000 degrees or more across the face of the heat shield. If the energy generated by this infernal descent were converted to electricity, it would equal 86,000 kilowatt-hours, enough to light up Los Angeles for a minute and a half. If it were converted to kinetic energy, it could lift every man, woman and child in the United States ten inches off the ground. Aboard the spacecraft, however, the heat would have just one effect as temperatures rose, a dense ionisation cloud would surround the ship, reducing communications to a hash of static lasting about four minutes. If radio contact was restored at the end of this time, the controllers on the ground would know that the heat shield was intact and the spacecraft had survived; if it wasn’t, they would know that the crew had been consumed by the flames. In the flight director’s station, Gene Kranz stood, lit a cigarette, and clicked on to his controllers’ loop.
“Let’s go around the horn once more before reentry,” he announced “EECOM, you go?”
“Go, Flight,” Aaron answered.
“RETRO?”
“Go.”
“Guidance?”
“Go.”
“GNC?”
“Go, Flight.”
“Capcom?”
“Go.”
“INCO?”
“Go.”
“FAO?”
“We’re go, Flight.”
“Capcom, you can tell the crew they’re go for reentry.”
Kerwin said, “Odyssey, Houston. We just had one last time around the room, and everyone says you’re looking great. We’ll have loss of signal in about a minute. Welcome home.”
“Thank you,” Swigert said.
In the sixty seconds that followed, Jack Swigert fixed his eyes out the left-hand window of the spacecraft, Fred Haise fixed his out the right, and Jim Lovell peered through
the center. Outside, a faint, faint shimmer of pink became visible, and as it did, Lovell could feel an equally faint ghost of gravity beginning to appear. The pink outside gave way to an orange, and the suggestion of gravity gave way to a full G. Slowly the orange turned to red – a red filled with tiny, fiery flakes from the heat shield – and the G forces climbed to two, three, five, and peaked briefly at a suffocating six. In Lovell’s headset, there was only static.
In Mission Control, the same steady electronic hiss also streamed into the ears of the men at the console. When it did, all conversation on the flight controllers’ loop, the backroom loops, and in the auditorium itself stopped. At the front of the room, the digital mission clock read 142 hours, 38 minutes. When it reached 142 hours, 42 minutes, Joe Kerwin would hail the ship. As the first two minutes went by, there was almost no motion in either the main room or the viewing gallery. As the third minute elapsed, several of the controllers shifted uneasily in their seats. When the fourth minute ticked away, a number of men in the control room craned their necks, casting glances toward Kranz.
“All right, Capcom,” the flight director said, grinding out the cigarette he had lit four minutes ago. “Advise the crew we’re standing by.”
“Odyssey, Houston standing by, over,” Kerwin called.
Nothing but static came back from the spacecraft. Fifteen seconds elapsed.
“Try again,” Kranz instructed.
“Odyssey, Houston standing by, over.” Fifteen more seconds.
“Odyssey, Houston standing by, over.” Thirty more seconds.
The men at the consoles stared fixedly at their screens. The guests in the VIP gallery looked at one another. Three more seconds ticked slowly by with nothing but noise on the communications loop, and then, in the controllers’ headsets, there was a change in the frequency of the static from the ship. Nothing more than a flutter, really, but a definitely noticeable one. Immediately afterward, an unmistakable voice appeared.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 32
