DATE: 1970.
WHAT IT IS: The Apollo 13 command module.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It is nearly 11 feet high and weighs approximately 13,000 pounds. From its violent reentry into the earth’s atmosphere, Odyssey’s exterior has been burned a rusty orange.
“Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
— Apollo 13 command module pilot Jack Swigert
“Failure is not an option.”
— Mission Control Flight Director
Gene Kranz to the ground crew
Two hundred thousand miles away from earth, a manned spacecraft is soaring through the vast darkness of space when suddenly an explosion reverberates harshly through the vessel. The main supply of oxygen, power, and water is lost, the mission is aborted, and the three-man crew is faced with a life-and-death predicament. How can they get themselves back home to earth when the backup battery in their command module offers only a fraction of the energy needed to return safely?
What follows is one of the most remarkable tales in the annals of space travel, a testament to the ability of humans to triumph over their machinery when it goes awry in the most perilous of circumstances. And with the vessel that served as a main stage for this dramatic event having survived, we have today a remnant of that tale—a mute, scarred witness to one of the most daring, daunting, and miraculous voyages of all time.
After the Russians had unmistakably moved ahead in the space race by making Yuri Gagarin the first human in space on April 12, 1961, the pride of the United States was deeply tarnished. Three weeks after Gagarin orbited the earth, astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., became the first American to be launched into space, but Shepard made only a fifteen-minute suborbital flight in which he spent five minutes flying outside the earth’s atmosphere. Although it was an important accomplishment, America’s manned space-flight debut was not as impressive as the Russian mission. The next year, in an address at Rice University in Houston, Texas, on September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy affirmed that America would put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth “before the end of this decade.”
With only limited success in its space program, the idea of the United States being able to send a crew into space to reach the moon in under eight years was not just an ambitious goal, but an incomprehensibly huge task, certainly the vision of a dreamer. But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) relished arduous challenges, and it established the Apollo space program to accomplish the impossible: in a relatively short time, to put a human being on a different world.
The Apollo program began tragically, however; Apollo 1 never made it into space. During routine ground exercises, a fire erupted on the vessel, killing the three astronauts scheduled to make the first manned flight of the program. Unmanned Apollo flights followed, and eventually the first manned mission, Apollo 7, in which the spacecraft, comprising both command and service modules, orbited the earth. Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to go to the moon, but it only orbited the moon without setting any crew members on the surface. The manned Apollo 9 flight tested a lunar module in earth’s orbit, and Apollo 10 was the final dress rehearsal for the first manned lunar landing: the astronauts took their craft’s lunar module into lunar orbit, flying within several miles of the lunar surface but not setting it down. Apollo 11, in which the first lunar landing was made, was truly a historic voyage, and Neil A. Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on another celestial body. Apollo 12 was a subsequent manned mission to the moon to collect soil and rock samples.
Apollo 13 was to be America’s third lunar mission. While the landing crew of Apollo 11 had explored the moon’s Sea of Tranquility and Apollo 12 the Ocean of Storms, the lunar landing crew of Apollo 13 was to explore the Fra Mauro Formation, particularly a hilly upland area north of the Fra Mauro crater, deploying equipment for scientific experiments, conducting geological surveys, and photographing future potential exploration sites. The equipment they would set down to measure such events and phenomena as meteoroid crashes, variations in lunar atmosphere temperature, and heat flow from underground to the moon’s surface constituted ALSEP, the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package.
Three astronauts made up the Apollo 13 crew: James A. Lovell, Jr., the commander; John L. Swigert, Jr., the command module pilot; and Fred W. Haise, Jr., the lunar module pilot. Swigert was actually a backup member chosen to replace Thomas K. Mattingly III after backup lunar module pilot Charlie Duke accidentally exposed the crew to the German measles, and it was found that Mattingly did not have antibodies for immunity to the contagious disease.
There were three major components of the Apollo 13 spacecraft: the command module, named Odyssey; the service module; and the lunar module, named Aquarius. The command-service module (the two components were connected through the flight until reentry) was the main ship—the astronauts would sleep and work in the command module, the vessel’s life-support and propulsion systems being located in the service module—and was the vessel in which the astronauts would return to earth. The two-man lunar module was an ancillary craft that would separate from the command-service module in its orbit of the moon, take the landing party to the moon’s surface, and then, after the lunar mission was complete, ascend to reunite with the command-service module orbiting the moon. The lunar module would be jettisoned back to the moon to test the seismological equipment left on it.
At 1:13 P.M. CST on Saturday, April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 was launched from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The lunar module was scheduled to set down on the moon four days later, on April 15. The landing crew would venture out twice to conduct their explorations and investigations—at 1:13 A.M. and 8:58 P.M. CST, both on April 16. The next day, April 17, the landing crew would depart from the moon to link up with the orbiting command module. Early in the afternoon of April 18, the spacecraft would propel itself out of its moon orbit and splash down in the Pacific after 2:17 P.M. CST on the 21st of April.
For the first forty-six hours the journey to the moon proceeded according to schedule—so well, in fact, that the Mission Control capsule communicator (CapCom), astronaut Joe Kerwin, remarked, “The spacecraft is in real good shape as far as we are concerned. We’re bored to tears down here.”
Apollo 13 is launched from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, at the Kennedy Space Center at 1:13 P.M. (CST) on April 11, 1970. Little did the space vehicle's astronauts--James A. Lovell, commander; John Swigert, command module pilot; and Fred Haise, lunar pilot--know what was in store for them, but soon the whole world would be following their dramatic flight.
But then forty minutes later, when the fans for oxygen tank number two were routinely turned on, the tank’s oxygen quantity reading zoomed from normal to “off-scale high.” Within the next few hours the crew turned on the fans twice more, still obtaining “off-scale high” readings, then rested. In the meantime, the ground crew at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston had observed a malfunction in hydrogen tank number one, and, almost fifty-six hours after Apollo 13’s launch, asked the astronauts to activate the fans and heaters of the cryogenic systems. At this time Apollo 13 was about 200,000 miles from earth.
The fans for oxygen tank number two were turned on, and the tank’s pressure began to rise as the stabilization-control system signaled a power transient. The tank’s pressure reached its maximum, then jumped to “off-scale high” again. Then it started to decrease, and seconds later its temperature plunged to “off-scale low.” The master caution and warning alarm sounded, signaling an electrical problem. Oxygen flow to fuel cells one and three began decreasing, then ceased. Then there was a rise in temperature of the service propulsion-system helium tank. At 9:07 P.M. CST on Monday, April 13, there was a loud bang on board Apollo 13.
James Lovell, in the lower equipment bay, and Jack Swigert, in the left seat of the command module, thought the bang they heard was just a joke played by Fred Haise, who had previously moved a valve that had triggered a similar rumble. But Haise was innocent of any horseplay, and he quickly assured Lovell and Swigert that the explosion they had heard and felt was no joke.
The crew observed that the voltage on DC main bus B was low and realized they were in trouble. “Okay, Houston,” Jack Swigert announced to ground control. “We’ve had a problem here.” “Say again?” responded CapCom Jack Lousma, and this time Lovell reported, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here. We’ve had a main B bus undervolt.”
The explosion had emanated from liquid-oxygen tank number two. As would later be determined in more detail, combustion had caused the tank, which supplied oxygen to the fuel cells that powered the command and service modules, to fail. But for now, the spacecraft, the mission—and indeed the astronauts—were in a state of crisis. Oxygen tank number one was out. The command module had no power, the service module was dead, and only the lunar module was operational. The spacecraft was more than eighty-five hours from earth, and the backup battery in the command module offered a maximum life of only ten hours—and that had to be preserved for reentry to earth to supply power to the command module’s reentry computers.
With the mission aborted, a decision had to be made about how Apollo 13 would return home. One option was simply to turn the spacecraft right around and head back, but that would have consumed too much fuel. The method finally chosen was fraught with danger; if not carried out correctly, it could have meant the demise of the spacecraft’s passengers.
An hour after the explosion, Mission Control announced to the Apollo 13 crew, “We are starting to think about the LM lifeboat.” The use of a lunar module in an emergency had for years been considered, but implementing it in such dire circumstances required the examination of previous studies. With the command module running out of power, a plan had to be settled on soon.
It was decided that the Apollo 13 crew would try to come home using the lunar module as a lifeboat. The astronauts would leave the command module for the lunar module, where they would navigate the spacecraft around the moon, then use the moon’s gravitational pull to increase their speed and hurtle them back toward earth. At some point the earth’s gravity would grab them and pull them back in, and the command module would be used for the final approach to earth. In theory it was plausible, but would it actually work?
According to the laws of physics, it could. With Apollo 13 continuing toward the moon, at some point the gravitational pull of the moon would start to take over, sending the spacecraft around the back of the moon. The spacecraft would be caught in a kind of whirlpool, but at a proper point in its lunar orbit, the lunar module would fire its rockets to escape the moon’s gravitational pull and slingshot the craft toward earth. From this point, the vessel would pretty much be on cruise control, building up speed as it headed home. It was important that Apollo 13 hit the earth’s atmosphere at exactly the right angle; if it came in too shallow it would skip off the earth’s atmosphere and go into an eternal orbit around the earth, and if it came in too steep it would burn up as soon as it entered the atmosphere.
With such a small margin for error, the flight had to be planned precisely. There were several obstacles. With Aquarius, whose mass and center of gravity differed from the command module, driving the entire spacecraft, corrections in the course had to be calculated and effected. The velocity of the craft had to be increased using Aquarius’s descent engine, an operation it was not designed to handle. And simply trying to stay alive inside the spacecraft was becoming a greater challenge as the consumables (chiefly oxygen and water) were being depleted and the temperature inside the cabin was dropping by the minute.
As Odyssey is kept afloat in the South Pacific Ocean after it splashed down at 12:07 P.M. (CST) on April 17, 1970, astronaut John L. Swigert is lifted in a Billy Pugh net to a helicopter, where Fred W. Haise has already been taken. James Lovell waits in a life raft with a U.S. Navy underwater demolition swimmer, while other navy team swimmers involved in the recovery operation are in the water.
Indeed, Aquarius, with its limited power and air, wasn’t made for such an excursion. Its engines were designed for the ascent and descent of the lunar module. It was like taking a car designed to drive on city streets and trying to drive it over rocky mountains. But the principles were there. If a truck could be driven through mountainous terrain, a car ought to be able to as well, even though that had not been its intended use, and even if it had never been tried before. But the bottom line was that there really wasn’t much of a choice. It was either that or lose the crew.
Many of the potential problems of such a lunar-module excursion were addressed by members of the Mission Control team, who called in specialists from the companies that had participated in the manufacture of the various systems aboard Apollo 13. They used computers and simulators to conduct tests and maneuvers, and the results of these were used to guide the space-traveling astronauts. The ground crew investigated numerous trouble areas, and astronauts at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center ran emergency tests in lunar-module simulators.
The lunar module was the “lifeboat” for most of the trip back to earth. It supplied oxygen and power, and the astronauts worked in there and even rested there. Because of the conservation of power, the men found it too cold to sleep in the command module, but though Aquarius was warmer, at 38 degrees Fahrenheit it was still cold, and Mission Control was concerned that this would prevent the astronauts from getting the rest they needed to handle the tricky navigation of the craft. But the astronauts held up, and so did Aquarius.
As the three astronauts worked their way out of their cosmic dilemma, the world beneath them watched closely, following every scrap of news broadcast about the crew. A dozen countries offered to help in recovering the landed spacecraft. People all over the globe prayed for the successful return of the astronauts, then glued themselves to their television sets to watch coverage of the flight.
Odyssey, the Apollo 13 command module, is set down by a cable on the USS Iwo Jima in the South Pacific.
Meanwhile Apollo 13, having been whipped out of lunar orbit, was hurtling back toward earth. All the systems on board the command module had been shut down save those for life support and communication, and its power consumption was lowered to enable it to sustain its occupants. Because the lunar module had no heat shield, the landing would have to take place in the command module. More than four hours before the spacecraft would reenter the earth’s atmosphere, with Lovell and Haise in the lunar module, Swigert jettisoned the damaged service module. As the service module drifted away the crew got their first look at the damage it incurred in the explosion. Due to the extent of the damage questions were raised as to whether the explosion had caused structural damage to the heat shield; if it had been damaged the ship could burn up during reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. The answer would not be known until reentry.
About ninety minutes before reentry the astronauts got back into the command module, and the lunar module, the astronauts’ deliverer and savior, was ejected. Mission Control bade farewell to Aquarius, as did the astronauts. It was up to Odyssey now to deliver the Apollo 13 crew safely back to earth.
Shortly after noon CST on Friday, April 17, nearly eighty-seven harrowing hours after the accident and after more than five days and twenty-two hours in space in total, the three parachutes of Odyssey opened, permitting the craft with the three astronauts aboard to gracefully drop into the Pacific Ocean. Instead of being doomed to endless orbit in outer space, Odyssey—with its precious human cargo—was home again.
And so Odyssey lives on,* a shrine to the valor of the men and women who participated, in space and on the ground, in Apollo 13’s mission, and a grand testament to the fact that while the journey to the cosmos may be fraught with danger, the unbridled spirit and boundless ingenuity of human beings can overcome even the most formidable of obstacles.
LOCATION: Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, Hutchinson, Kansas.*
*In the 1960s and early 1970s, after command modules returned to earth, they would routinely, for budgetary reasons, be gutted so that their parts could be installed in other spacecraft to reduce costs. Odyssey was likewise stripped of its parts, and when it arrived at its current home in Kansas, staff members devoted much time to locating its lost hardware. Many interesting tales attend the recovery of the parts, including the long search for one of Odyssey’s major control panels, which ended only when it was found and identified by its serial number in one of the holding institution’s own exhibit crafts.
*Odyssey is on permanent loan to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, which has in its collection from the Apollo 13 flight the astronauts’ space suits, a parachute, photographic equipment and accessories, a slide rule, the astronauts’ chronographs, and a microform Bible that one of the astronauts brought on board.