Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (34 page)

The launch of
Apollo 13
went well—although superstition had been running high. For a start, there was that fateful mission number. Second, Lovell’s wife Marilyn had lost her wedding ring before the flight took off. ’Til death do us part. The loss was featured in the 1995 film
Apollo 13
, starring Tom Hanks, and although at first thought to be a fiction added into the plot for dramatic effect, Lovell admitted later that it had actually happened.

Days one and two of the mission unfolded much as planned. One of the engines had cut out a couple of minutes early—no harm done, though, and Lovell and Co. might have been entitled to think that that had been their inevitable hiccup. At 55 hours into the flight they began a scheduled television broadcast for the folks back home. Lovell’s tape recorder, floating around the command module, played
“Aquarius” from the musical film
Hair
as well as “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the theme from
2001: A Space Odyssey
. They were making it look easy, commonplace.

Shortly after the broadcast came to a close, the good times ended for
Apollo 13.
A warning light had come on back at Houston, telling the technicians that pressure was dropping in one of the onboard hydrogen tanks. This was nothing particularly worrying in itself, and Mission Control simply told the crew of
Apollo 13
to turn on a set of cryogenic fans and heaters. This was a routine action known as “stirring the tanks.” There was nothing at all routine about what happened next.

All seemed well enough for about another minute and a half, and then Lovell, Swigert and Haise heard a loud bang—not the kind of noise an astronaut wants to hear while he’s floating inside a tin can, 200,000 miles from home. Looking outside, the astronauts could see evidence of an explosion—exposed wires, missing panels—and some sort of vapor or gas streaming into space.

Back at Mission Control, they already knew something bad had happened. For two whole seconds,
Apollo 13
had gone quiet—as all radio transmissions from the ship had switched off. In the momentary silence, Swigert had spoken into the void.

“OK, Houston,” he said. “Hey, we’ve had a problem.”

Once the radio came back on, gentleman Jim Lovell repeated the gist of the line, but with a change of tense.

“OK, Houston,” he said. “We have a problem.”

No panic and no swearing. Cars have been parked with more anxiety.

What they couldn’t know then—but what an inquiry would establish later on—was that there’d been a short circuit inside one of the tanks when the crew attempted the “stir.” Teflon insulation around an electrical motor on an internal fan was damaged and a small fire broke out, eventually causing an explosion that blew apart
one of the ship’s oxygen tanks and damaged the other. What all this meant was that the command module was now bleeding to death. The vapor they saw venting into space was the gas they depended on to keep themselves and the onboard systems alive. When the oxygen tank exploded, part of the panel covering it had blown off and hit the radio transmitter on the side of the capsule—hence the two-second-long radio blackout noticed by Mission Control.

When you hear about events like these—matters of life and death—it’s tempting to assume the necessary decision and actions were being taken and made by men of our dads’ age: true grown-ups. But the ones who looked after the astronauts during the space flights of the 1960s and early 70s were hardly men at all, more like boys. The scientists and technicians now staring into computer screens and preparing to deal with whatever had just happened to
Apollo 13
had an average age of 26. Gene Kranz was Director of Mission Operations until 1994. When Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, he was 35 years old.

“I was the old man,” he said.

The screens and readouts were telling Mission Control that the command module,
Odyssey
, erstwhile home for the three astronauts, was dying. If urgent action were not taken, Lovell, Swigert and Haise would die along with it. Mission Control ordered the three men to go through the routines required to “power down”—switch off the module. Until the men on the ground could figure out how to bring it back to fully functioning life, the crew would have to find somewhere else to live.

Apollo 13
the movie has the three men shouting at each other at this point, trying to figure out if one of them is to blame for what has just happened. The truth aboard
Odyssey
was less dramatic but more impressive by far. Instead of panicking, they went about their assigned tasks quietly and calmly. With all power off inside the command module, the temperature dropped uncomfortably low. It
was dark in there too, and it was at this point in the drama that the crew moved into the lunar module.

Despite there being barely enough room to turn around inside
Aquarius
, far less swing a cat, it would have to be their temporary home; their fragile life raft in an ocean of black.
Apollo 13
was supposed to be about a moon landing. That target was gone now, along with the contents of the command module’s oxygen tanks.

By then, in 1970, landing on the moon had been accomplished twice. After Armstrong and Aldrin,
Apollo 12
’s Pete Conrad and Alan Bean had repeated the trick. Facing the crew of
Apollo 13
was something quite new. They had to find a way to stay alive and get back home after just about everything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

Having watched those two moon landings, the viewing public had lost interest in the space race by the time
Apollo 13
’s astronauts were showing them weightless tape recorders. But as news of the accident was transmitted, people around the world suddenly found a new reason to be enthralled by events unfolding high above their heads.

On April 14,
Apollo 13
made its loop around the moon. Lovell was looking down at a familiar view, but for his fellow travelers it was all new. As they passed around into the dark side, they were a long way from their intended lunar orbit. In fact their unintended but now unavoidable path meant they were all of 200 miles above the moon’s surface. For as long as that long, lonely loop continued, they were further from home than any human beings before or since.

Down on the ground, the 26-year-olds were trying to find solutions to a set of problems that no one had ever imagined before. At Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Mission Control in Texas, two teams began simulating the conditions controlling the astronauts’ lives. Every solution was tested on the ground to prove it worked before any instructions were transmitted to
Aquarius
. In simple terms, there were two tasks:

 

1. To keep the three men alive.
   
2. To repair the crippled spacecraft to the point where it was capable of bringing them home.
   

 

But while hundreds of men scurried around trying to find answers, three men were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder inside a fragile bubble of air. They were more than four days from home and their life raft,
Aquarius
, was only designed to keep two men alive for 48 hours. While on the dark side of the moon, the astronauts were ordered to fire the lunar module engines to speed up their return. This was not what the engines had been designed for—they were only intended for use in getting to and from the moon’s surface—but the frightening move was executed perfectly by Lovell. The three were now 12 hours closer to home.

Kennedy Space Center engineers found a way to use the lunar module’s electrical system to recharge that of the stricken command module. Others came up with a way of using some of the men’s drinking water to double as a cooling system. Easily the most pressing problem was the atmosphere inside the module. With three of them breathing the same limited air, the level of deadly carbon dioxide was rising fast. Even this challenge was safely met. A filtration system cobbled together from plastic notebook covers, cardboard and any thing else known to be aboard
Aquarius
was assembled on the ground before the instructions for its assembly were sent to the crew.

It is claimed that the biggest television audience in history witnessed their eventual return. On April 17, after five days, 22 hours and 54 minutes,
Aquarius
was spotted falling safely toward Earth, suspended beneath its massive parachutes. It splashed into the sea just off Samoa, watched by millions of television viewers and the crews of the US Navy flotilla sent to intercept it. The voice of commentator Walter Cronkite, the world’s most believable man, cracked with the emotion of the moment.

Jim Lovell never ventured into space again. For a while after
Apollo 13
he was in charge of the “backroom” scientists monitoring the moonwalks of other men. He retired from NASA in 1973. Jack Swigert left the same year and was executive director of the Committee on Science and Technology for the House of Representatives until 1977. He ran a successful campaign for election to Congress in 1982, but died of cancer before he could take office. Fred Haise was scheduled to be commander of
Apollo 19,
but after
Apollo 17
no more men ever flew to the moon.

We’re still waiting.