Charles “Pete” Conrad examines the unmanned Surveyor 3 space probe during the Apollo 12 mission.
SUCCESS AND SUCCESSFUL FAILURE
The successful and almost flawless Apollo 11 mission was followed in 1970 by a second manned Moon mission—Apollo 12, which experienced a lightning strike during take-off. However, this event now seems insignificant compared with the high drama that surrounded the next mission—Apollo 13. But thanks to the ingenuity of Mission Control and the calmness of those on board the stricken craft, disaster was averted and the crew returned safely to Earth.
On October 11, 1969, Soyuz 6 thundered into orbit carrying two rookie cosmonauts, Georgi Shonin and Valeri Kubasov, both 33 years old. It had been almost ten months since the last Soviet manned flight. This was to be a shakedown mission to identify and iron out problems. Among its objectives were perfecting spacecraft control systems, testing navigational devices and taking photographs of the Earth.
Mounting rumors of more Soyuz launches were confirmed the following day, when Soyuz 7 lifted off with more rookie cosmonauts, Anatoli Filipchenko, 41, Vladislav Volkov, 33, and Viktor Gorbatko, 34. Within two hours of launch, Soyuz 8 was launched on October 13, 1969, with veteran cosmonauts Colonel Vladimir A. Shatalov and Aleksei Yeliseyev on board. By the following day the three spacecraft were in a common orbit. As planned, Soyuz 7 and Soyuz 8 approached each other to within a distance of 500 meters (1640 ft.), while Soyuz 6 watched from close by. Docking between Soyuz 7 and Soyuz 8 had been planned to be semiautomatic, with the Igla system bringing the two ships to a distance of 100 meters (328 ft.).
That the mission was a complete mess was underlined in a US intelligence report, declassified in 1997. The five rendezvous attempts during the mission were all unsuccessful for various reasons. The first was unsuccessful because the automatic rendezvous system failed, and it was followed by a manual attempt that used too much fuel when trying to dock. Further attempts also failed. Despite this, the cosmonauts’ return to Moscow was turned into a national celebration.
Despite events behind the scenes, Soviet propaganda attempted to justify their space “successes” and diminish the achievements of Apollo. The Americans were involved in a costly, empty race for political reasons, the Soviets stated, with no thought as to the good of the people or the real benefits of spaceflight. After Brezhnev finished his speech welcoming the Soyuz crews, it was clear to most in the Soviet space program that the Moon race was over and a new era had begun—the age of the space station.
The second Moon landing mission, Apollo 12, was launched into a thunderstorm on November 14, but it was nearly over before it began—it was struck by lightning. Alan Bean was the Lunar Module pilot:
I did not know we were hit by lightning. I had no window. The window was covered then, and certainly, with all the noise and vibration, there’s nothing. So many different caution, warning things came on. All the electrical system lights came on, every single one. This was no failure that we’d ever practiced. In the backup for Apollo 9, in the flight for 12, we did every failure they had ten times. There was no failure that was even close. I looked at that control panel, and I thought: “What could cause that? Everything there had gone.” So I said: “We’re getting ready to go into orbit without a Service Module.” I was thinking: “What can I do about that?” So I’m there dividing my time between thinking: “What is going wrong that would give us this indication?” And: “Here’s my chance, and I don’t have the slightest idea what to do.” So my brain is not even able to completely concentrate on solving the problem. I was doing all that. Then I’d hear Pete and Dick over there. They’re working on their part of the problem, and they start talking about lightning, and that doesn’t mean a lot to me, because I’m still trying to figure out what to do.
Then they call to get me to throw a switch, which I did, I didn’t remember what the switch was for, either. I wasn’t in any big hurry, because we were headed up to orbit, and I didn’t want to screw that up by messing around over here. So I tried one and it stayed on. So I said: “Wow. That doesn’t even show.” You know, I checked the amps and volts. It worked good. It was great. I put on another one. It did the same thing; it worked great. I put on the third one. Each time I was waiting for something to go: “Beep!” you know, and everything go off again. It never did.
Having survived the lightning strike, Apollo 12 headed for the Moon. The Command Module pilot was Dick Gordon:
We were assigned a specific target called Surveyor 3 which was in a specific crater on the lunar surface. And the reason for learning how to do that was later missions we’re going to land alongside 13,000 foot mountains and big valleys that were 600 meters deep and a kilometer across, the highlands of Descartes and Hadley Rille on 15 and Taurus-Littrow on 17. Later on, these sites were not picked but we knew that we wanted to go to other places that were going to require precise navigation.
Lunar Module Intrepid landed in the Ocean of Storms, a region of the Moon that had been visited many times by unmanned space probes; Luna 5, Ranger 7 and Surveyor 3 which had been on the Moon since April 1967. Intrepid touched down only 200 meters (656 ft.) away. When he stepped onto the surface, Pete Conrad said: “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.”
During two moonwalks lasting a total of seven hours and 45 minutes they collected rocks, set up experiments and walked over to Surveyor 3, removing several pieces from it to take back to Earth to see how it had fared during its two and a half years of exposure on the Moon. Only one thing marred the mission. To improve the quality of television pictures from the Moon over the ghostly black and white images returned from Apollo 11, a color camera was included. Unfortunately, Al Bean accidentally pointed it at the Sun, burning it out. Situated on the crew’s spacesuit cuffs were flipover checklists. The backup crew inserted reduced-sized pictures of Playboy centerfolds. Presumably a space first!
Dick Gordon: They had a good time on the lunar surface. They came back so damn filthy that I wouldn’t let them in the Command Module. I made them strip, take every bit of clothes off they had. It had an extraordinary amount of dust that clung to their suits. When I looked into that Lunar Module when they took that hatch apart, all I could see was a black cloud in there, I didn’t see them at all. I looked in there and said: “Holy smoke. You’re not getting in here and dirtying up my nice clean Command Module.” So they passed the rocks over, they took off their suits, passed those over, took off their underwear, and I said: “Okay, you can come in now.”
Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had overcome his medical problem and was due to command Apollo 13. But NASA was concerned that he would not be ready to fly Apollo 13, so they asked Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Ken Mattingly—originally due to fly in Apollo 14—if they would take over the earlier mission and let Shepard train for the later one. Then Ken Mattingly was exposed to measles, to which he was not immune. Shortly before launch he was replaced by Jack Swigert. Launch was on April 11, 1970.
Lovell: We’re out two days before the accident happens. But 30 hours after we took off, we got onto a different course because the course we were on originally was called a free-return course to allow us to get back to the Earth. But—about 30 hours, we changed course to land at this place—we were going to land at a place called Fra Mauro and the sunlight would be in the proper position to see the shadows. And then two days out, on this hybrid course, the explosion occurs. We just finished a TV program. That was the last thing that evening. I think it was either 9 or 10 o’clock back here at Houston. And I’m coming back down through the tunnel, and suddenly there’s a hiss-bang! And the spacecraft rocks back and forth. The lights come on and jets fire, and I looked at Haise to see if he knew what caused it. He had no idea. Looked at Jack Swigert. He had no idea. And then of course, things started to happen. The light came on. Something was wrong with the electrical system. We started—we eventually lost two fuel cells. We couldn’t get them back. Then we saw our oxygen being depleted. One tank was completely gone. The other tank had started to go down. Then I looked out the window, and we saw gas escaping from the rear end of my spacecraft.
It was Jack that said: “Houston—we’ve had a problem.” And Houston said: “Say again, please?” And I say: “Houston, we have a problem. We have a main B bus undervolt.”
Haise: At the time of the explosion, I was in the Lunar Module. I was still buttoning up and putting away equipment from a TV show we had completed, and really we—subsequently we were going to get ready and go to sleep. I knew it was a real happening, and I knew it was not normal and serious at—just at that instant. I did not necessarily know that it was life-threatening. Obviously I didn’t know what had caused it.
Within a very short time, though, I had drifted up into the Command and Service Module to my normal position on the right, which encompasses a number of systems—the electrical system, cryogenics, fuel cells, communication, environmental systems—and I was just looking at the array of warning lights. It was confusion in my mind because we had never had a single credible failure that would have caused that number of lights on at one time.
One thing, though, just looking over the instrument panel that became very clear in short order was the fact that the pressure meter, the temperature, and the quantity meter needles for one of the oxygen tanks was down in the bottom of their gauges. These are different sensors, so it was unlikely that this was false. So it effectively told me we had lost one oxygen tank. My emotions at that time went to just a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, because I knew by mission rules, without reference, that that meant the cancelation of the lunar mission. We were in an abort mode but still not life-threatening, because we had a second oxygen tank, I thought, which looked to be still there. And we’d have stayed fully powered-up and then just took an abort mode to come back home in a—with everything fully powered. It took some minutes to become obvious that there was, for whatever reason—that there was a leak that the explosion had caused in the second oxygen tank. Either the tank or one of the lines. And—but a small leak. And when that—when it became obvious it was dwindling or losing oxygen, then the handwriting was on the wall that the Command Module, it was going to die and have to be powered-down.
Lovell: The thought crossed our mind that we were in deep trouble. But we never dwelled on it. We never, you know, sort of gave up and said: “What are—what’s going to happen if we don’t get back? Where are we going to be?” My thoughts were this: if everything failed and we still had life-support in the Lunar Module but we couldn’t get back to the Earth, you know, the heat shield was damaged or we just went past the Earth. I said that: “We will send back information. We’ll keep on operating as long as we can. And then, that’s the end of the deal.” So, that was what I had planned to do in my mind should—you know, should something happen. People often ask, you know, this poison pill deal’s ridiculous.’
The critically damaged Apollo 13 Service Module photographed by the crew after jettisoning. An entire panel is missing, blown away by an explosion in oxygen tank number two.
Mission Controller Gene Kranz remembers the dramatic events of the night well:
They’d go into the Lunar Module, and they also had a television broadcast of the Lunar Module. The television broadcast was concluded. And the final—we were in the process of closing out the items in the shift prior to hand over to Glynn Lunney’s Black Team. After television broadcast was concluded, the wives and families had been behind me in the viewing room, and as they left we sort of waved: “Okay,” etc., “Adios,” and they went off. They turned the lights out in the viewing room behind me, and the final thing we had to do was to get the crew to sleep. And we have a very detailed presleep checklist we’d go through. It’s about five pages in length. And we had gone through each one of these checklist items very meticulously because in Mission Control, the greatest error that always lends to a lot of levity at the postmission party is for some flight controller to miss something in this presleep checklist that cause us to wake up the crew. And we have a series of awards we give out at the parties if this happens. And it’s not all the jollies you get; you get really ridden pretty hard. So, we were very meticulously following through this checklist. We were down to the final item in the checklist. We were getting ready to close it out.
And we were down to the final entry, and—the cryogenics, the fuels that we use on board the spacecraft, are oxygen and hydrogen. It’s a super dense, super cold liquid at launch at temperatures of -300 to -400 °F, packed in vacuum tanks. But by the time you’re two days into the mission, you’ve used some of these resources. And these consumables have turned into a very thick, soupy fog or a vapor in the tank. And like fog on Earth, it tends to stratify or develop in layers. So, inside the tanks, we have some fans we turn on to stir up this mixture and make it uniform so we can measure it. Then we use some heaters to raise the pressure for the sleep period. Well, we had asked the crew to do this. In the meantime, the next control team was reporting in for shift handover, so the noise level in the room was building up; and their flight director, Glynn Lunney (he was the leader of the Black Team, and we used colors to identify those teams), was sitting next to me at the console. He was reading my flight director’s log. And we advised the crew that we wanted a cryo stir. Jack Swigert acknowledged our request, and he looked behind him and coming through the tunnel, from the Lunar Module, was Fred Haise. Sy Liebergot at this time had the responsibilities for the cryo systems, had now switched his attention to the current measurements that he had. And Swigert started the cryo stir.
Liebergot saw the currents increase indicating the stir had started. All of a sudden I get a series of calls from my controllers. My first one is from guidance. It says: “Flight, we’ve had a computer restart.” The second controller says: “Antenna switch.” The third controller says: “Main bus undervolt.” And then from the spacecraft I hear: “Hey, Houston, we’ve had a problem.” And there was a pause for about 5 seconds. And then Lovell comes onboard to say: “Hey, Houston, we’ve got a problem.” Within Mission Control, literally nothing made sense in those first few seconds because the controllers’ data had gone static briefly; and then it—when it was restored, many of the parameters just didn’t indicate anything that we had ever seen before. Down in the propulsion area, my controllers all of a sudden saw a lot of jet activity. Jets were firing. We then see Lovell—and this is all happening in seconds—we then see Lovell take control of the spacecraft and fly into an attitude so he can keep communicating with us.
And for about 60 seconds, literally, the calls kept—I mean, just coming in. But they made no sense. They made no pattern, right on down the line, until finally the training that’s given the controllers kicked in. And very meticulously, they started making the calls that were called—relayed up by Jack Lousma, my Capcom at that time.
For probably about 60 to 90 seconds, it’s literally chaos in this place. And then it’s amazing how this whole thing, it starts to take focus. We still don’t have the slightest clue what’s going on. But instead of listening to every crew call and—controller call and relaying it up, I start being much more selective in this process. Because I’m starting to get the feeling that this isn’t a communications glitch. I’m about five minutes into this problem right now. It’s something else. We don’t understand it. So, we proceed very meticulously. And I call the controllers up and I tell them that: “Okay, all you guys, quit your guessing. Let’s start working this problem.” Then I use some words that sort of surprised me after the fact. I say: “We’ve got a good main bus A. Don’t do anything to screw it up. And the Lunar Module’s attached, and we can use that as a lifeboat if we need to. Now get me some backup people in here and get me more computing and communications resources.” I’d said these words, but then I immediately went back to tracking this thing.
The second oxygen tank is now continuing to decrease. Two of our fuel cells are off line, and these are our principal power-generation systems that we use. Liebergot then comes to me and says: “Hey, flight, I want to shut down fuel cells one and three.” And I say: “Sy, let’s think about this.” And he says: “No, flight, I think that’s the only thing that’s going to stop the leaks.” And then I go back to him the third time and I say: “Sy,” and he says: “Yeah, flight, it’s time for a final option.” And very reluctantly I agree to advise the crew that we’re going to shut down fuel cells one and three. I think this is probably the point in the mission where everybody has realized that we’ve now moved into a survival mode because with two of the three fuel cells shut down, we’re not going to the Moon anymore. We’re going to just be damn lucky to get home alive.
By this time, Lovell’s called down and indicating they’re venting something. And we’ve come to the conclusion that we had some type of an explosion onboard the spacecraft; and our job now is to start an orderly evacuation from the Command Module into the Lunar Module. At the same time, I’m faced with a series of decisions that are all irreversible. At the time the explosion occurred, we’re about 200,000 miles from Earth, about 50,000 miles from the surface of the Moon. We’re entering the phase of the mission—we use the term “entering the lunar sphere of influence.” And this is where the Moon’s gravity is becoming much stronger than the Earth’s gravity. And during this period, for a very short time, you have two abort options: one which will take you around the front side of the Moon, and one which will take you all the way around the Moon.
If I would execute what we call a “direct abort” in the next two hours, we could be home in about 32 hours. But we would have to do two things: we’d have to jettison the Lunar Module, which I’m thinking of using as a lifeboat, and we’d have to use the main engine. And we still have no clue what happened onboard the spacecraft. The other option: we’ve got to go around the Moon; and it’s going to take about five days but I’ve only got two days of electrical power. So, we’re now at the point of making the decision: which path are we going to take? My gut feeling, and that’s all I’ve got, says: “Don’t use the main engine and don’t jettison this Lunar Module.” And that’s all I’ve got is a gut feeling. And it’s based, I don’t know—in the flight control business, the flight director business, you develop some street smarts. And I think every controller has felt this at one time or another. And I talked briefly to Lunney, and he’s got the same feeling.
Then John Aaron said: “There’s no way we’re going to make five days with the power in the Lunar Module. We got to cut it down to at least four days, maybe three.” So, we were now moving ahead. The team split up and moving in several different directions. I had one team working power profiles. I had another group of people that was working navigation techniques. I had a third one that was integrating all the pieces we need. My team picked up the responsibility to figure out a day to—a way to cut a day off the return trip time.
During Apollo 9, we did a lot of testing of the Lunar Module engine while the two spacecraft were docked together. And immediately as soon as we recognized we had to perform a maneuver to speed up our return journey, that’s the set of procedures we fell back to. We updated these procedures, based on the situation at hand. My team came back on console and executed these procedures, and increased our velocity on return by almost 1000 feet per second. Changed the landing point from the Indian Ocean now to the South Pacific. We sent the aircraft carrier Iwo Jima to the new landing location.
Apollo 13 was now in survival mode. Everything on the spacecraft had to be conserved for reentry. All the power they had was about the equivalent of a 200 watt light bulb. Everything else had to be powered down. Another problem occurred: the lithium hydroxide canisters that removed harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air were in the shutdown Command Module and the canisters in the Lunar Module were running out. The problem was that they were not interchangeable. The canisters in the one wouldn’t fit in the other.
Mattingly: We had another consumable. I don’t remember anybody forecasting that we would have a CO2 problem, but as soon as the light came on, we recognized it. In the movie [Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks] there’s this really neat scene where they’ve got a tableful of stuff and Robert Smylie dumps a bag of what they had in space on the table, and he says: “Figure something out.” Well, the real world is better than that. The real world is that we had had a simulation, and I think it was on Apollo 8, I believe, where the simulation supervisor had jammed one of the cabin fans with a screw that floated loose. I think they had broken some electrical connections or done something of that ilk. The conclusion, you know, the simulations were done with the rule that the simulation may be four hours, but it’s not over until everything is under control. So sometimes those things got to be rather lengthy simulations. The solution that they came up with was that they could make a way to use the vacuum cleaner in the Command Module with some plastic bags cut up and taped to the lithium hydroxide cartridges and blow through it with a vacuum cleaner. So, having discovered it, they said: “Okay, it’s time for beer.” Well, on 13, someone says: “You remember what we did on that sim? Who did that?” So in nothing short, Joe Kerwin showed up, and we talked about: “How did you build that bag and what did you do?” Oh, it was easy. Solving that problem took an hour, maybe two. Because it’s real now, they made him build a demonstration model, so that took another 30 minutes. Then, “How are we going to tell these guys in the cockpit?” And the answer was, if you just said go tape your lithium canisters to the suit hose, that’s probably all they had to say.
Haise: The vehicle had gotten very cold. We were a little warmer than freezing but not a lot. And that kind of wore on you after a while. We did not have adequate clothing to handle that situation. We did put on every pair of underwear we had in the vehicle. Jim Lovell and I wore our lunar boots, the boots we would normally put over our spacesuit boots on the lunar surface.
Due to the cold there were fears about what the extensive condensation would do to the controls in the Command Module when it was time to power it up before reentry. Fortunately it worked. Many believe that was due to the extensive modifications made after the Apollo 1 fire.
Prior to reentry they jettisoned the Lunar and Service Modules. One side of the Service Module had been ripped out by the explosion. The last task was reentry. The Command Module entered the atmosphere.
Kranz waited: There isn’t any noise in here. You hear the electronics. You hear the hum of the air conditioning occasionally. In those days, we used to smoke a lot. Somebody would only hear the rasp of the Zippo lighter as somebody lights up a cigarette. And you’d drink the final cold coffee and stale soda that’s been there. And every eye is on the clock in the wall, counting down to zero. And when it hits zero, I tell Kerwin: “Okay, Joe, give them a call.” And we didn’t hear from the crew after the first call. And we called again. And we called again.
And we’re now a minute since we should’ve heard from the crew. And for the first time in this mission, there is the first little bit of doubt that’s coming into this room that something happened and the crew didn’t make it. But in our business, hope’s eternal, and trust in the spacecraft and each other is eternal. So, we keep going. And every time we call the crew, it’s: “Will you please answer us?” And we were one minute and 27 seconds since we should’ve heard from the crew before we finally get a call. And a downrange aircraft has heard from the crew as they arrive for acquisition of signal. And then almost instantaneously from the aircraft carrier, we get: “A sonic boom, Iwo Jima. Radar contact, Iwo Jima.” And then we have the 10-by-10 television view. And you see the spacecraft under these three red and white parachutes, and the intensity of this emotional release is so great that I think every controller is silently crying. You just hear a “Whoop!”
Back on Earth they reenacted the drama. Fred Haise recalled what happened:
It was interesting that when Jim Lovell and I, after the flight, went just out of curiosity—went back into a Lunar Module simulator, we could not replicate the time of that activation in … the nice, calm conditions of a ground simulator that we had done in flight.
Lovell: NASA will claim that they are absolutely not superstitious. But I’ll bet you my last dollar, they’ll never name another spacecraft 13.
Spurred on by the Apollo 13 setback the Soviets tested their own version of the lunar lander in Earth orbit in 1970 and 1971, but there was nothing to be gained by it. It took them a while to realize it.
TIMELINE
