Apollo: The Race to the Moon (65 page)

“G.N.C., I haven’t heard from you on the heaters yet on the I.M.U.”

“Rog, Flight,” G.N.C. replied. “Preliminary look at it looks like we could pull those circuit breakers, power-down the heaters. We’re still trying to get a handle on it.”

Thinking how much of the command module’s battery power had to be saved for the entry phase, Lunney observed, “We may well have no choice.”

“That’s a fact,” G.N.C. conceded.

Lunney was struck by a thought. “How many amps do they take?” he asked.

“Ten.”

In their current situation, this was an enormous amount of power, and to be of any use it would have to be maintained throughout the rest of the flight.

“Aww!” Lunney exclaimed. “Ten amps?!”

“Rog,” the reply came back, sheepishly, as G.N.C. suddenly realized that his team had been missing the point.

“I’m looking at …”—Lunney did a quick mental calculation—“fifty, sixty, eighty hours.” (Another nervous “Rog.”) “That’s academic!” (A hurried “I understand.”)

A few minutes later, G.N.C. came back with a correction. If they heated the I.M.U. but turned off the gyros and the rest of the apparatus, they would need only .8 amp, and they recommended leaving the heater up. Lunney pointed out briskly that .8 amp still worked out to 64 amp-hours. “I can’t afford that.”

They would assume that the I.M.U. could survive without a heater.

“We only almost lost it once,” Lunney said. It occurred during the final stages of the move from Odyssey to Aquarius, when two separate processes were going on simultaneously. In Aquarius, Lovell and Haise were moving through their improvised activation checklist, bringing the LEM’s systems on line. For the past ten minutes, they had been preoccupied with getting a good course alignment, which they had done in record time. Jack Swigert was still in Odyssey, powering down the systems one by one.

The LEM now had a computer that was up and running, and a good set of angles punched into the guidance system. In their relief, the reaction of the men in the MOCR was to assume that now the LEM was operational and that Odyssey could safely render itself helpless. The problem was that the activation routines were being relayed up to the two spacecraft in chunks. Among these chunks was the one that included the steps necessary for pressurizing the reaction and control system (R.C.S.) in Aquarius and powering up the “balls”—short for “eight-balls,” referring to the displays that let Lovell and Haise know the spacecraft’s attitude. But the actual rate at which the crew in Aquarius was accomplishing these steps, and the actual order in which they were being performed, were in doubt.

Reflecting on it afterward, Lunney said that at that point he should have stopped and established a clear-cut understanding of the obvious: Whatever else you do, don’t power-down the command module’s platform and its R.C.S. until the LEM’s control systems are up. But he didn’t, and the two procedures got out of synch with the rest. Odyssey’s platform and R.C.S. were powered down, Aquarius’s R.C.S. and eight-balls were not yet ready to take over. As they listened to the traffic, the mix-up slowly became apparent.

“Okay, we haven’t gotten ourselves in a position here, where, uh, we have no attitude control in either vehicle, have we?” said Lousma uncertainly. “Uhh … I’m …” Lunney sounded almost abashed. “I’m waiting to see when we get attitude control in the LEM. Would you ask them to call us when they have attitude control in the LEM and then we’ll power the inverters, et cetera, down in the C.S.M.?”

Lousma asked Aquarius to inform him when they had attitude control. Haise replied that they were still working on the pressurization of the R.C.S. system—which meant they still didn’t.

“Hey, Flight,” Lousma said plaintively, “they don’t have attitude control in the … and we don’t have it in the C.M., uh, C.M.S., uh …” Lousma was a little flustered himself.

“Well, they’re trying to get it up, right?” Lunney said. “Yeah, they are,” replied Lousma, but he was openly unhappy.

The spacecraft did not go to gimbal lock while it drifted—the gap in control was only about two and a half minutes long—nor would it have been catastrophic if it had, Lunney reflected. They would have put the crew to sleep, worked up some procedures, and done a manual course alignment when the crew was rested. Nonetheless, Lunney was always irritated with himself for having allowed it to happen. “It turned out to be not a real problem, but I was really pissed at myself because it was—well, it was kind of the only mistake we made that night.”

At nine minutes before midnight, Jack Swigert closed down Fuel Cell 2, completing the shutdown of Odyssey. The LEM was now fully operational, with an alignment stored in its guidance system. It had been two hours and forty-three minutes since Swigert had first reported a problem, about an hour and twenty minutes since the MOCR had first realized the crew would have to use the LEM. Right after Apollo 13, John Aaron recalled, F.O.D. prepared special checklists for activating the LEM as a lifeboat, and during the sims for every mission that followed, the flight control team was thrown at least one massive Thirteen-type failure on a translunar coast. But no matter how good the new checklists were, and no matter how much they practiced, Aaron said, “we never did it that quick again.”

Swigert drifted through the docking tunnel into Aquarius. This was alien territory for Swigert, who as a command module pilot had never spent any training time in the LEM simulator. He looked down at Lovell and Haise from the hatch. “It’s up to you now,” he said.

Lunney’s team remained on shift for another seven hours. During that time, Building 30 became, as it would be for the rest of the mission, the end of a gigantic funnel of information. Throughout the first few hours of the crisis, the Control Center had had to make most of the decisions itself—events were flowing too quickly to bring in more than the most urgently required information from the outside world. Now expertise of every sort was flowing through the network. When Simpkinson said that SPAN put “everybody in the world” to work on the problem, he was barely exaggerating about the world of Apollo.

In Houston, it was no longer just the MOCR, the MER, and SPAN that were filling with people. Bill Tindall, who had recently been promoted to deputy director of Flight Operations, convened a semi-continuous Mission Techniques meeting to concentrate on ways to use the LEM’s navigational system for tasks it had never been designed to accomplish. The astronauts congregated in Building 5 where the flight simulators were installed. Stan Faber, chief of the Flight Simulation Branch, began running a nonstop show, with crews following one another in the simulator, testing out each new procedure that was required to keep Thirteen going, until just before splashdown—in all, seventeen astronauts participated at various times during the flight. Former astronaut Jim McDivitt, the new manager of ASPO, was taking all of ASPO and splitting it up into small problem-solving teams—a power team, a cooling team, a trajectory team. SPAN was no longer a little room in Building 30; for practical purposes, one SPAN engineer recalled, it expanded to include the whole Center.

Joe Mechelay of the Test Division arrived to take his shift in the MER on Tuesday morning and found “mayhem.” Usually, only one or two of the systems teams would be busy at any given time; now they all were. The room was jammed not just with people, but also with schematics and books of specifications that were spread out everywhere. Despite the appearance of chaos, however, the MER was by this time well organized. For each system, it had been established what needed to be done and which were the most crucial items. Arabian himself devoted his attention to whichever problem was at the top of the priority list, shifting to a new one as soon as the old problem seemed to be under control.

The scene was much the same at the contractors. When Tom Kelly got to the Bethpage plant at 3:00 A.M., he found five or six hundred people already congregated there. At M.I.T., Downey, and at smaller places like Hamilton Standard in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, which had built the LEM’s environmental control system, staff engineers showed up unbidden in the middle of the night to see what they could do to help. Few went home. The next three and a half days would find engineers draped anywhere on their company’s premises—desktops, chairs, conference tables—catching a catnap. In some cases, the managers would get together and decide that nothing was being accomplished by this kind of devotion and that it would really be better if people went home for a few hours and slept in a comfortable bed. But most of the engineers would unobtrusively refuse to obey, unwilling to be away for even that long.

Within hours, Apollo 13 also became a story that engaged the attention of the outside world as nothing else about the space program had done except the first lunar landing. When a Grumman engineer hurrying to Bethpage was stopped for speeding and explained where he was going, the police gave him a high-speed escort down the Long Island Expressway, sirens screaming. France was just the first of thirteen foreign governments—the Soviet Union among them—that offered the United States use of their naval vessels for emergency rescue service. In the next days, Pope Paul prayed with an audience of 10,000 for the astronauts’ safe return. Rabbis in Jerusalem offered special prayers at the Wailing Wall. Throughout Europe, bulletins on the crew’s condition interrupted news programs. The U.S. embassy in London compared the British reaction to that which had followed Kennedy’s assassination. The front pages of papers from Oslo to Bangkok were covered with news of Thirteen.

The Manned Spacecraft Center itself was in the eye of the media hurricane. Hundreds of journalists descended on Houston after the accident (until then, interest in Thirteen had been tepid), but they were confined to the area around the public affairs offices. The only people who saw much of them were the flight directors who briefed the press after every shift. None of the other people at M.S.C. who were working the problem had time to notice how preoccupied the world had become with what they were doing. Later, when FIDO Dave Reed watched a film that NASA had made about the flight, he found himself most deeply affected by the picture of a young Asian woman watching Apollo 13 coverage on a store-window television somewhere on the other side of the world from Houston. Her face was a study in concern. He hadn’t known.

Inside the Control Center, the pace during the rest of the Black Team’s shift slowed after the C.S.M. had been powered down. The remainder of the night was occupied with the work necessary to configure Aquarius for the long trip home, and with deciding what trajectory to use. Finally, after almost nine years of manned space flight, the Retros were going to have a chance to use their expertise in aborts.

Down in Room 210, Chuck Deiterich, the lead Retro for Apollo 13, led the discussion. At the time of the accident, the spacecraft was close enough to the earth for a direct abort that would have brought it back to earth without going around the moon first. But as Kranz had quickly realized when he heard about the venting, something disruptive had happened back in the service module. They had to assume that the big S.P.S. engine was unusable. This left two widely divergent options, Deiterich explained. They could wait for another eighteen hours until the spacecraft had swung around the moon, fire Aquarius’s descent engine nearly to exhaustion, and get the crew back on earth in two and a half days. Or they could perform a brief burn right away to put the spacecraft onto a return trajectory that would loop around the moon and return the crew in four days.

Getting the men back quickly was obviously attractive, but it had serious drawbacks as well. Using up Aquarius’s fuel was not the kind of action that they wanted to take immediately if they could buy themselves time. It would leave few options if they were to make a mistake or if something else went wrong. Deiterich argued for a short burn now to get the spacecraft on a free return. They could make a second burn later, after they had taken the time to think about what kind of burn they wanted. There were objections to that strategy as well—two burns meant roughly twice as much drain on the spacecraft’s electrical and water supplies as one burn—but the flight control philosophy on this point was deeply ingrained: Don’t cut off an option unless you absolutely have to. Kranz approved Deiterich’s approach and Lunney concurred.

A burn by an Apollo spacecraft has been compared to coming about in a sailing ship—it takes the same kind of extensive preparation. In the case of the first burn of the docked LEM and C.S.M., it required more than an hour after the burn decision had been made to calculate the trajectory of Thirteen (which had been changed significantly by the explosion and venting) and to check out the peculiarities posed by a docked burn. The DPS engine, which could be gimbaled in varying directions, had to be lined up exactly with the center of mass of the docked assembly that it would be pushing. Then there were small frights to contend with—the astronauts, conducting a final check before the burn, discovered that a switch that could eject the LEM’s descent stage with its DPS engine was On. It was quickly turned to Off.

Finally, at 2:43 in the morning, Lovell pushed the ignition button and the DPS engine ran at low throttle for thirty seconds, putting the spacecraft into a trajectory that, even without a second burn, would bring it down in the Indian Ocean not quite four days later. Lovell was relieved. He wasn’t completely confident that the burn provided them a survivable entry, but at least the spacecraft would intercept the earth’s atmosphere. In his mind, this was much better than the alternative they had just avoided—orbiting the earth indefinitely, in a lonely revolution with an apogee of 240,000 miles and a perigee of 3,000 miles, a “perpetual monument to the space program.”

When the burn had been completed, CapCom passed up some advice from the astronauts in Building 5 on how to maneuver a spacecraft in this unholy configuration. Aquarius’s crew also put the spacecraft into a rough, manually controlled version of passive thermal control to prevent overheating of the spacecraft’s sunward parts. It was a nasty job to do without sleep, without practice, after six hours of a life-threatening crisis that had drained the crew of its reserves, but somehow they accomplished it. Jim Lovell sent Fred Haise off to the rapidly chilling command module to get some sleep.