Apollo: The Race to the Moon (60 page)

At the Mission Techniques meetings, FIDO Dave Reed, who would be handling the lunar descent for Twelve, talked with Pete Conrad about the target strategy. Conrad was supposed to land his LEM close enough to Surveyor III, an unmanned probe that had soft-landed on the moon three years earlier, to enable him and Al Bean to walk over to it and bring pieces back with them. The object was to obtain information about the effects of exposure to the lunar environment over a period of years. Since Apollo 12 did not have a battery-driven Lunar Rover (which would not be available until Apollo 15), the maximum landing error that would still permit Conrad to reach the Surveyor was on the order of 2,000 feet. Even if the navigation on Twelve was markedly improved, it seemed implausible that they could get that close on the second manned landing—Armstrong had been more than four miles off target. So the conversations between Reed and Conrad had an air of unreality about them.

“Where do you want me to put you down?” Reed asked Conrad. The first time, Conrad told Reed to put him on the far side of the crater in which Surveyor would be resting. They ran a couple of simulations that way, with Conrad in the LEM simulator watching an image of Houston’s plaster-of-Paris lunar surface as he came in over a configuration of three craters they called “Snowman,” which would tell him he was on the right track. Then one day Conrad told Reed he didn’t want to walk that far. Put me on the near edge of the crater, Conrad said. So Reed changed the parameters in the software. Watching Reed calculate these minute changes, apparently in all seriousness—the crater itself was only 600 feet across—Conrad finally told Reed. “You can’t hit it anyhow! Target me for the Surveyor.” “You got it, babe,” Reed said, and he proceeded to enter coordinates that would land the LEM precisely on top of the Surveyor if Schiesser’s bright idea worked.

At midnight Houston time, November 18, four days after Yankee Clipper’s encounter with lightning, Emil Schiesser stood behind two Martin contractor personnel at their consoles in a corner of the first floor of the Control Center, near the computers. As the LEM Intrepid appeared at the edge of the moon, the screens began to fill with the tracking data they had been waiting for. The three of them then began filling out their cheat sheets, more formally known as Procedures Sheets—they looked something like tax forms—copying numbers from the screen. Then, as Conrad and Bean streaked across the face of the moon under powered descent, the three of them began figuring out the value for Noun 69—by hand. The Control Center’s computers didn’t know how to do something as simple as multiply two numbers, Schiesser said, and they hadn’t bothered to bring in a mechanical calculator. They scratched out their calculations, passed the number to the Trench, who gave it to Flight, who told CapCom to transmit it to the crew.

As Intrepid descended through 7,000 feet toward the lunar surface, it pitched to an upright position and Pete Conrad and Al Bean got their first look at the approach to the landing site. In front of them, right where it was supposed to be, was Snowman. “Hey, there it is!” announced Conrad.

“Sonofagun, right down the middle of the road!” They had a chance, at least, of getting close to the Surveyor. As the LEM continued past Snowman, Conrad began to realize just how close they were going to come: “Hey, it [Intrepid] started right for the middle of the crater,” he cried. “Look out there! I just can’t believe it! Amazing! Fantastic!”

Dave Reed had still been a little off. Intrepid wouldn’t have actually landed on top of Surveyor if Conrad had let it alone—it would have been perhaps as much as 150 feet away. That was close enough to shower the Surveyor with dust. Too close. Conrad took manual control, steering the LEM across the crater to a safe distance—on the far rim after all.

A few years later, after the four LEMs following Intrepid had each descended to within a few yards of their targets, Neil Armstrong was giving an interview to a historian of the manned space program. The interviewer, thinking of astronauts and senior managers, asked Armstrong: After all the years he had spent at M.S.C., who did he think stood out in talent and ability? Neil Armstrong grinned. “Emil Schiesser!” he replied. “I’d vote for Emil every time.”

Chapter 27. “You really need to understand that the C.S.M. is dying”

When Apollo 13 lifted off on April 11, 1970, manned space flight was one day shy of the ninth anniversary of Gagarin’s flight. In the intervening years, the actual flights had been unexpectedly safe. Thirty-seven times, men had sat atop rockets and been blasted off into space; thirty-six times, they had returned safely. Only once—if one discounted rumors of unacknowledged Russian catastrophes—had a flight resulted in a fatality: In April 1967, Vladimir Komarov of the Soviet Union had perished after his parachutes failed to deploy properly during an emergency entry. Of the thirty-six crews that had returned safely, the Americans had launched twenty-two—six in Mercury, ten in Gemini, six in Apollo.

So perhaps it was time for something to go wrong. Or perhaps Providence was rebuking the Apollo engineers for the sin of hubris. Or perhaps the superstitious were right, and NASA was asking for it. Flight number 13? Launched at the thirteenth minute of the thirteenth hour of the day, Houston time? What else could one expect two days into the flight, when April 13 arrived, but that something awful would happen?

But while Apollo 13 was objectively a failed mission, it was something else altogether to the people who were involved in it. For Glynn Lunney, thinking back to the long development of Flight Operations that had begun with such halting steps in 1959, “Apollo 13 was the crowning achievement”—not just for the Control Center people, but for the people flying and all the people on the ground. It was crowning, because it was ultimate. No crisis that manned space flight faced in the future could be much worse, Lunney thought, and still be survivable—“We were as close as you get to the edge and are still able to pull back.”

The crisis on Thirteen began on the third evening of the flight. The command module Odyssey and the lunar module Aquarius were outward bound, 205,000 miles away from the earth. Jim Lovell, veteran of two Gemini flights and Apollo 8, at that time the most experienced American astronaut, was commanding the flight. Fred Haise, the lunar module pilot, was making his first space flight, as was Jack Swigert, the command module pilot.

Swigert was in a unique situation. As part of the backup crew for Thirteen, he had been pressed into service just three days before launch when it was discovered that astronaut Charlie Duke, who had been working with the prime crew, had contracted German measles. Lovell and Haise were immune, but the prime CMP, Ken Mattingly, was not. Lovell fought to keep Mattingly on the crew—even if he got the measles, they would be on the way home in trans-earth coast when it happened, Lovell argued, and measles weren’t that bad anyway—but Administrator Paine finally sided with the doctors and insisted that Swigert replace him (Mattingly did not, by the way, get the measles after all). Swigert had done well during the training that he and Lovell had packed in during the two days before launch, and he got along fine with Lovell and Haise. Still, he was anxious to do his job just right. So far, the only problem had been getting good readings on the quantity of hydrogen left in one of his storage tanks.

At nine o’clock that night, Houston time, Lovell and the rest of the crew completed a television broadcast. None of the three networks had carried the show—by April 1970, flights to the moon were old hat, as were ill-lit pictures of whiskery astronauts floating around in their spacecraft. The main audience had been the people at M.S.C., watching on the television monitors scattered around the Center. In the MOCR, flight director Gene Kranz had permitted the O&P officer to throw the television image onto one of the screens on the front wall. With the spacecraft safely on course, the LEM docked with the command module, and nothing much to do for twenty hours until L.O.I., this was one of the laziest shifts during a lunar flight.

Seymour (Sy) Liebergot, a Californian, almost elderly by MOCR standards at the age of thirty-four, was the White Team’s EECOM for Thirteen. As the television show ended, he got onto the loop to Flight to ask for a cryo stir. “Cryo” referred to the cryogenics: two tanks each of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen that produced the spacecraft’s electricity, oxygen supplies, and water. Chilled to their liquid state because that was the only way to store a sufficient amount for the lunar journey, the O2 and the H2 (as the controllers referred to them) were fed into three fuel cells, which converted them to electricity and, as a by-product, drinking water. The electricity passed into two main electrical buses, A and B, from which the equipment on the spacecraft drew power.

The system was so simple and so redundant that it seemed foolproof. Each of the two tanks of oxygen and hydrogen was adequate to last the entire mission if something were to happen to the other one. Any two of the three fuel cells could meet all the spacecraft’s needs, and just one of them could bring the spacecraft home. There were two main buses, either one of which could if necessary distribute power to all the spacecraft’s equipment. Each of these redundant systems had (almost perfectly) the best of both worlds: They were independent insofar as potential failures were concerned, but linked so that they could take over one another’s duties. Piping, valving, wiring—everything was designed so that problems could be bypassed. Short of being hit by a meteoroid or something equally improbable, it was thought that the Apollo spacecraft could never run short of water, oxygen, or power.

Liebergot had decided this would be a good time to help Swigert get a good quantity reading on the H2 tank that had been giving him problems. To do that, the astronauts would turn on two small fans in each of the four cryo tanks. The gases tended to settle into layers with different temperatures and densities, and stirring with the fans was necessary to produce the homogeneous tank temperature necessary for an accurate reading. It was a routine procedure that they ran once a day. Tonight’s was an extra one prompted by the balky H2 tank. At 9:07 P.M., CapCom Jack Lousma passed the request for a cryo stir to the crew.

Three men were working the shift in EECOM’s back room: Dick Brown, the electrical power systems (E.P.S.) specialist; George Bliss, an environmental control system (E.C.S.) specialist; and Larry Sheaks, another E.C.S. specialist. It was not customary for the astronauts to tell the ground precisely when they flipped the switches that turned on the fans, so Liebergot and his two E.C.S. men began watching the H2 quantities carefully as soon as the request was passed up. The numbers in question were located at the bottom-right corner of a screen called “CSM ECS CRYO TAB.”

At 9:08, the conversation on the EECOM loop, which until then had been quiet and desultory, suddenly changed. In the background, on the air-to-ground loop, Swigert could be heard saying, “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Immediately thereafter, Larry Sheaks cried out indignantly, “What’s the matter with the data, EECOM?!” “We got more ’n a problem,” chimed in Dick Brown. Liebergot himself was now looking at a second screen on his console, called “CSM EPS HIGH DENSITY,” which showed the status of the electrical system. “Okay, listen you guys,” Liebergot said to his back room, “we’ve lost Fuel Cell 1 and 2 pressure.” George Bliss ran his eyes over the cryo screen, and then reported the rest of it: “We lost O2 Tank 2 pressure. And temperature.” The crisis had begun.

1 minute. To the left of Liebergot and up a row was Gene Kranz. At 9:07, he and his White Team were entering the last hour of their eight-hour shift. The conversation over the flight director’s loop had been leisurely, as he and Guidance discussed whether to uplink some data into the onboard computer directly from the ground, or to read it off to the crew and let them enter the information themselves. Kranz was listening to someone else when Swigert said “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem,” but he heard Guido Will Fenner report a few seconds later: “We’ve had a hardware restart. I don’t know what it was.”

“Okay,” said Kranz. “G.N.C., you want to look at it and see if you see any problems?” A hardware restart indicated some unusual event that the computer had detected and was checking. Then Lovell’s voice stopped Kranz short:

“Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a Main B Bus undervolt.” An “undervolt” meant a substantial reduction of power into Bus B, jeopardizing the equipment running off it. Kranz went to his EECOM: “You see an AC Bus undervolt there, EECOM?”

“Negative, Flight.” This was true—Liebergot had not seen the undervolt—but his answer was not entirely forthcoming. Liebergot was already looking at several other serious problems, and he wanted a few seconds to sort them out.

Kranz persisted: “I believe the crew reported it.” Even as he spoke, Brown was telling Liebergot from the back room that he had seen an undervolt as well.

“Okay, Flight,” Liebergot amended. “We got some instrumentation problems. Let me add them up.”

Liebergot wasn’t the only person who thought he had instrumentation problems. All around the MOCR, controllers were seeing strange indications on their screens. INCO (the instrumentation and communications systems officer, formerly known as TelCom) reported to Flight that the high-gain antenna had switched to high beam. Kranz, who was as baffled as everyone else by what was happening, told INCO to try to pin down the exact time of the change, hoping that it would give him some clues. Then G.N.C. Buck Willoughby was on Flight’s loop, telling him that the spacecraft was changing attitude in unexpected ways. The helium valves on some of the R.C.S. (reaction and control system) jets that controlled the spacecraft’s attitude were acting as if they were closed. They should be open. Kranz fielded this strange collection of problems, wondering what in the hell had happened up there.

When Liebergot told Kranz that he would add up the instrumentation problems, he did not mention that he was also looking at a loss of pressure in two of the three fuel cells. This was true to flight-controller custom: You didn’t go to Flight with a problem until you were reasonably confident that it was a problem. In this case, the probability that two independent fuel cells would go bad at the same moment had to be somewhere in the vicinity of six or seven decimal places. They could, however, appear to go bad at the same time because of glitches in the electrical system, and that, Liebergot thought, was surely what had happened.