by Jay Barbree
Armstrong and Aldrin then set up a seismometer to gather information on quakes and meteorites hitting the lunar surface. An instrument to measure the flow of radiation particles inside the solar wind and a multi-mirror target for returning laser beams fired from Earth were deployed—laser reflectors that would not only be used by American scientists, but Russian and other global investigators as well.
In the lunar dust they placed mementos for the five astronauts and cosmonauts who had lost their lives, and Neil Armstrong read the words on a plaque mounted on Apollo 11’s descent stage: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant the American flag on the moon. (NASA).
The two astronauts gathered fifty pounds of lunar soil samples and rocks, and once everything was loaded for the flight back to Earth, they shut down the first moonwalk.
Twenty-one hours after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface, they fired Eagle’s ascent engine and left the moon.
They saw the first American flag deployed on the lunar landscape toppled by the rocket’s blast. That was all the time the astronauts had for sightseeing. They had to man Eagle’s controls and computers and radar systems for the three-and-a-half-hour trip needed to reach Michael Collins and Columbia orbiting sixty miles overhead.
Armstrong and Aldrin flew Eagle precisely down the route pioneered by Apollo 10’s Snoopy two months earlier and, as steady as a rock, linked up with Columbia. After they moved their lunar booty into the command ship, they discarded their faithful Eagle, leaving it to orbit the moon for several weeks before lunar gravity pulled it into a crash landing.
It would take two-and-a-half days to make the return trip home, but Neil, Buzz, and Michael knew the way. All they had to do was follow the trail locked in the computers by Frank, Jim, Bill, Tom, Gene, and John—the astronauts of Apollos 8 and 10.
Back on Earth, the uncontrolled celebrations began.
Apollo 11’s splashdown parties set a record.
In fact, the parties quickly grew into one that covered all the communities in and around Mission Control, and when they were finally over, Houston had to lend the small towns a fleet of garbage trucks to haul away the mess.
NBC’s Chet Huntley, America’s number-one and most-loved television news anchor of the day, was one of the warmest and most considerate people you could meet until he decided to take a drink. Then Chet would change from this fatherly, lovable introvert to an “everything goes” extrovert.
During his very successful career (so I’m told), Huntley could be found pushing his stalled automobile through the streets of Miami’s infamous Liberty City at 3:00 A.M., directing late-night traffic in the middle of the George Washington Bridge, or driving a hansom cab through Central Park with a governor and not his bride in the back.
On the night of Apollo 11’s great splashdown party, Chet and us folks from NBC partied hard. We partied down the streets, on the streets, across lawns, up stairs, on balconies, down stairs, through pasture lands, and in and out of all bars, and when we could no longer motor, Chet came up with a unique way of topping it all off. There had been much complaining about the talents of a piano player located poolside at our hotel, and when the last sour note was hit, Chet pushed piano and player in the pool.
Shad Northshield, NBC News’s general manager, stood staring at the piano on the pool bottom as he watched the drenched musician climb out of the water.
“Whose expense account am I going to put this one on?” he asked no one, before wobbling away for the privacy of his room.
Tales of Apollo 11’s splashdown parties were the talk of most social events through the summer and into the fall until Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Dick Gordon set sail for the moon’s Ocean of Storms on a wet November 14, 1969. NASA quickly learned that a thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V rocket climbing in rain clouds becomes a lightning generator.
I was standing under the launch on the NBC studio balcony, voicing a “radio on the scene” report. I was telling our listeners how I had just lost sight of Apollo 12 in the clouds when the only lightning bolt of the day cracked across our location. It filled the small city of buildings, tents, trailers, trucks, and grandstands with rolling thunder, and it cut a jagged streak from the Saturn V to its launch pad. I stopped my broadcast on a dime for our listeners to hear commander Pete Conrad’s report to Mission Control: “I think we got hit by lightning. We just lost the guidance platform gang. I don’t know what happened here.”
Tokyo, Japan: Heavy crowds and confetti greet the Apollo 11 astronauts as they motorcade down the Ginza. The “Giant-Step-Apollo 11” Presidential Goodwill Tour took astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins along with their wives to twenty-four countries and twenty-seven cities in forty-five days. (NASA).
Lightning had cracked against Apollo 12, tripping the spaceship’s main circuit breakers. Inside the command module all electrical power went out, returning with a flight panel filled with flashing warning lights.
“We just had everything in the world drop out,” Pete Conrad told the ground, and as the astronauts slid into Earth orbit, they worked with Mission Control to bring all of Apollo 12’s systems back on line. For the moment they were safe enough, but they had little more than two hours to get their ship back in the condition it needed to reach the moon. Few of us believed the second lunar-landing mission would ever leave Earth orbit. Every guidance, navigation, and computer system had to be reset with updated programs, and then validated by Mission Control.
The odds were definitely not in the Apollo 12’s favor, but we boarded a jet charter from the Cape to Houston and immediately began laying bets on the mission’s demise. I sat across the aisle from Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, and he was convinced Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Dick Gordon would not see the moon on this trip.
About an hour into our flight to Houston, one of the pilots came back and spoke to astronaut Borman.
He leaned over and whispered loud enough for me to hear. “Colonel Borman, I have a message for you,” he began. “Mission Control and Apollo 12’s crew have pulled off the impossible. They have all systems up and tested, and the third stage just fired. Apollo 12 is outbound—it’s headed for the moon.”
Frank Borman threw his hands into the air, shouting, “They’re on their way. Twelve’s up and running.”
Everyone on board the charter shouted and yelled, and a tired bunch of reporters and astronauts and NASA officials had just one request: flight attendants, keep the booze coming.
The three navy commanders inside the command ship they had named Yankee Clipper sailed into orbit around the moon. Crew commander Pete Conrad planned to land within six hundred feet of an unmanned Surveyor robot that had touched down to scout the Ocean of Storms landing site thirty-one months before.
Conrad and Alan Bean had named their lunar module Intrepid, and the two naval aviators flew to the moon’s surface with incredible accuracy. Conrad sat Intrepid down only a short walk from the Surveyor and Mission Control shouted, “Outstanding!”
Pete Conrad told those on the ground, “I can’t wait to get outside! Those rocks have been waiting four-and-a-half billion years for us to come out and grab them. Holy cow, it’s beautiful out there.”
Astronauts Conrad and Bean took two four-hour walks from Intrepid, deploying scientific instruments and collecting seventy-five pounds of rocks and lunar-surface soil. They jogged down the slope to Surveyor, where they collected fifteen pounds of parts and pieces from the robot to return to Earth for study.
They were enjoying every moment of their stay, but Conrad had one complaint. The dust was getting into everything and during their rest and sleep periods inside Intrepid, they remained in their suits to keep everything working.
Back for their second moonwalk, Conrad and Bean found the unexpected—a group of conical mounds, looking like…small volcanoes. They found green
rocks and tan dust, and scientists back home were beyond pleased.
The two moonwalkers left the Ocean of Storms and made a perfect flight to hook up with Dick Gordon and Yankee Clipper for the return trip home. JFK’s goal of landing astronauts on the moon and returning them safely to Earth before the decade of the 1960s was out had been achieved—twice.
FIFTEEN
The Successful Failure
Houston, we’ve got a problem!”
Inside Mission Control, flight controllers jumped to their feet.
“What the hell happened?” a voice called out. “The data’s gone haywire!”
Shift manager Sy Liebergot was on it instantly. “Listen up,” he ordered as he stared at the numbers on his monitor. “We’ve lost fuel cells 1 and 2 pressure, and we’ve lost oxygen tank 2 pressure and temperature.”
Apollo 13 was built for deep space and only moments before, astronaut Jack Swigert had flipped a switch to “stir the soup,” to activate tiny mixing paddles inside the liquid oxygen and hydrogen tanks. These super-cold liquids in Apollo 13’s fuel cells kept its three astronauts supplied with breathing air, drinking water, and electricity for their weeklong mission.
Unknown to the astronauts and Mission Control, during the “stirring,” two electrical wires had touched. A spark flashed. Fire raced toward the tank’s oxygen supply. Internal pressure grew. The tank’s dome blew as if it were a shotgun, blasting and shredding everything in its path.
Until that moment, fifty-five hours and fifty-five minutes since Apollo 13 had launched from Cape Canaveral, the third mission to land two men on the moon had been uneventful—even boring. But when the left side of the service module exploded, the astronauts felt a sudden bang! Two hundred thousand miles out, all hell had broken loose. Linked together like a train, the three-unit Apollo 13 assembly was rocked. The service module, the command module, and the lunar lander twisted and rolled through the debris field created from the explosion while inside the command ship, Swigert contacted Mission Control. His words, “Houston, we’ve got a problem,” put everyone on alert. Flight controllers took the temperature of Apollo 13’s life-support systems. Liquid oxygen had to remain at a critical 297 degrees below zero, and the liquid hydrogen tanks even colder, an unbelievable 423 degrees below, if the fuel cells were to continue supplying power and oxygen and water to the astronauts.
Apollo 13 continued its wild flight toward the moon. It looked as if the assembly of space vehicles could be breaking apart. The alarms wailed, the lights flashed while the crew and Mission Control clung to the belief that electrical glitches were causing the problems. No one wanted to believe Apollo 13’s astronauts were in mortal peril as the three quickly moved through their emergency list. They were resetting their cockpit’s switches, adjusting proper instrument settings that had been sent spinning by the explosion, and they were expecting that once they had everything back in its proper place, back on line, all would be well.
They were wrong. When they completed their emergency list resets the alarms still wailed, the lights still flashed, and in the language of pilots everywhere, they told Mission Control, “No joy.”
Apollo 13’s assembly continued to pitch, roll, and moan like a sailing vessel being tossed by high waves. Commander Jim Lovell and his crewmates, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, were not only concerned, they were puzzled. Thirteen minutes had passed since the jolting bang when Lovell looked outside, through a porthole. My God, he thought quietly as he stared at what could be a catastrophe.
“Houston,” Lovell said quietly. “We’re venting something out into the…into space.”
Jim Lovell felt a knot tightening in his stomach—a familiar knot from years of hairy situations in test flight. He was 200,000 miles from home, and the only tank that still held life-sustaining oxygen was draining itself into the black void. He was instantly aware that they had lost any hope of landing on the moon, and the immediate emergency was simply staying alive. His ship was in a circumlunar orbit—a figure-eight flight path around both Earth and the moon—and in this orbit, without a miracle, they would be marooned.
If the crew of Apollo 13 were to survive, experts on the ground had only hours to calculate and engineer a rescue.
Gene Kranz, the no-nonsense flight director who had landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, was in charge. He began by calming his shocked flight-control team. “Okay, now let’s everybody keep cool,” he said. “We’ve got the LM still attached. The LM is still good, so if we need it to get back home then let’s solve the problem. Let’s not make it worse by guessing.”
Kranz had barely pulled his team together when the second oxygen tank on Apollo 13 began to fail. It had been damaged in the explosion. The flight director told Lovell and his crew to start powering down the ship and reduce to an absolute minimum what they needed to survive. Then, he took a deep breath and paused for effect. “Two hours from now, unless we come up with something that’s never been done before, those guys are going to be in a derelict ship,” he told his team. “All they’ll have left are three short-life batteries and their reserve oxygen supply. And we can’t use them. They must save them for reentry.”
Deke Slayton stared at Kranz. “If they get that damn far. Let’s get this situation under control,” Slayton shouted. “We’re not losing this crew.”
CapCom Jack Lousma turned for his mike, only to be stopped by the words coming in from Jack Swigert on board Apollo 13. “This is Odyssey, Houston. What’s our oxygen status?”
“Oxygen is slowly going down to zero. We’re starting to think about the LM as a lifeboat.”
“That’s something we’re thinking about, too,” Swigert fired back.
The lunar module named Aquarius was the only chance Lovell, Haise, and Swigert had. They had to shut down the command ship and put it into hibernation, so later on it could be brought back to life for reentry.
“Odyssey, this is Houston. It looks like we’ve got about eighteen minutes left. The last fuel cell is going fast.”
Lovell and Haise pulled themselves through the docking tunnel connecting the two ships. The lunar module was built to land two astronauts on the moon safely and then, after a two-day stay, launch them for a rendezvous with the command ship. Under normal conditions the LM would be used for about forty hours. Somehow those forty-hour systems must be stretched to support not two, but three astronauts for four days, time needed to fly them around the moon and bring them back to Earth.
Swigert stayed behind in the dying Apollo while Lovell and Haise powered up the lunar module. One by one he shut down the Apollo’s systems. When the lights were off, he continued working by flashlight before he joined the others in the LM. Swigert transferred the precise alignment of the Apollo’s guidance platform to a similar guidance system within the lunar module. The guidance platform was a collection of gyroscopes and instruments needed to keep the spaceship aligned precisely with Earth and the moon—to keep Apollo 13’s location known to Mission Control every moment of the flight.
Even though Apollo 13’s crew would now be sustained by the lunar module, the astronauts would need to return to the cold, damp, hibernating command ship for food and bathroom facilities. It promised to be an uncomfortable ride.
Flight director Gene Kranz and his team decided to use the lunar-module descent engine for needed propulsion. They worked out a couple of rocket burns that should bring the Apollo 13’s crew safely home: “We’ll go for a brief burn a few hours from now before they reach the moon. That will give them the free-return trajectory. Then we’ll do a second burn later to drop them into the slot for reentry. That should bring them home in four days.”
Five hours and thirty-five minutes after Apollo 13’s service module blew away its left side, the astronauts fired off the lunar module’s descent rocket for thirty-one seconds. The burn was perfect. “Okay, Houston. Burn’s complete,” Jim Lovell reported. “Now we have to talk about powering down.”
The astronauts had more than enough oxygen to
get home, but the carbon dioxide canisters needed to scrub the poison from the air they breathed was another question. They had to find a way to make the canisters in Apollo work in the lunar module for three or four days, or the two big guys would have to throw the little guy overboard.
They had more than enough carbon dioxide scrubbing canisters from Apollo, but they were square. They would not fit the round openings used on the LM.
Deke Slayton laughed. “What do you expect from a government contract?” he shouted. “Now damn it, let’s do a little engineering here; let’s rig it to where they’ll all work together!”
Farm-boy Slayton led a group of engineers that came up with what they called “the Wisconsin dairy farm fix.” Using only materials the astronauts had on board, they jerry-rigged a contraption that would use Apollo 13’s square canisters.
It worked. Apollo 13 swept around the small world, disappearing behind its cratered surface. The crippled spaceship crossed the backside of the moon and when it emerged with its antennas pointing toward Mission Control, the astronauts were told by Houston to prepare for the lunar module’s descent-rocket burn. This would be the long rocket firing, the one needed to get them home.
On any other flight, proper flight-course 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 ignite the course-correction burn. But Apollo 13 was on its way home in the midst of a cloud of trash left by the explosion. The trash was really a part of the Apollo/lunar module assembly that traveled along at the same speed.
“If a star wasn’t visible, what about the sun?” Mission Control worked out the details. Before racing around the other side of the moon, the crew and ground controllers conducted a sun check and locked into the lunar module’s guidance platform.
