Thirteen

The Apollo Flight That Failed

Henry S. F. Cooper

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781480462199
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Space Science

An "exciting" minute-by-minute account of the Apollo 13 flight based on mission control transcripts from Houston ( The New York Times ). On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar landing in history. But as they soared through space, two hundred thousand miles from Earth, an explosion badly damaged their spacecraft. With compromised engines and failing life-support systems, the crew was in incomparably grave danger. Faced with below-freezing temperatures, a seriously ill crewmember, and a dwindling water supply, a safe return seemed unlikely. Thirteen is the shocking and miraculous true story of how the astronauts and ground crew guided Apollo 13 back to Earth. Expanding on dispatches written for the New Yorker, Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. brings readers unparalleled detail on the moment-by-moment developments of one of NASA's most dramatic missions.

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JUST BEFORE NOON, LOVELL radioed down to Kerwin that, with about twenty-four hours to go before splashdown, it would be nice to have the reëntry checklists up in the spacecraft, so that he and Swigert and Haise would have a chance to look at them. The day before, Kerwin had told the astronauts that the lists would be ready “by Saturday or Sunday at the latest.” Kerwin was now able to tell Lovell that the checklists were in good shape (“They exist,” he said) but that there was still some work to be done on them. By noon Thursday, one final job remained: the checklist for the lunar module and the checklist for the command module had to be tested out together in a computer called the CMS/LMS Integrator, which, as its name implies, would insure that the instructions for the two modules dovetailed—that there were no conflicts between them. This final simulation, which was being run by Mattingly, would take at least four hours more.

The astronauts had plenty to keep them busy while they were waiting. They had to set their cameras to photograph the service module as it was jettisoned the next day. They had to move equipment that was to be brought back to earth (such as the film they had taken behind the moon) from the lunar module into the command module. Then, they had to transfer quite a lot of unneeded equipment from the LM into the command module, because Deiterich was afraid that without the hundred-odd pounds of moon rocks they had expected to have with them the command module would be unbalanced on its plunge through the atmosphere. Lovell, who didn’t want a listing spacecraft, either, kept asking the ground to think up more heavy items for them to take into the command module. As fast as Lovell moved such items into the command module, Haise was moving other items out. Over the past four days, the astronauts had been storing their garbage—discarded lithium-hydroxide canisters, bags of wastes—in the command module, where it wouldn’t be underfoot, but now that the command module was being made shipshape, the garbage had to be moved back into the LM. “Boy, you wouldn’t believe this LM right now! There’s nothing but bags from floor to ceiling,” Haise said when the job was done. He snapped some pictures for the record.

The work warmed the astronauts a little, but when they stopped they grew cold again. The temperature in the LM had fallen to forty-five degrees—only ten degrees higher than that now prevailing in the command module. The CAPCOM said it sounded like a cold winter’s day and asked if it was snowing yet.

At about six-thirty Thursday evening, or less than eighteen hours before splashdown, Vance Brand, who was back on duty as CAPCOM, said that the checklist was about ready to be read up. The members of the Tiger Team were assembling in the third-floor Control Room to listen in; their work on the checklist wouldn’t be complete until it had been delivered to the astronauts. Brand told Lovell that the readup would start with the part of the timeline that dealt with the command module, so Lovell put Swigert, the command-module pilot, on the radio. “He’ll need a lot of paper,” Brand said. Earlier, Haise had mentioned an item nobody had thought to provide—“a big book with a lot of just plain old blank pages in it.” Swigert had been scrounging blank pages from other checklists in the spacecraft.

When Swigert had pen and paper ready, Brand told him to wait a minute; Aaron, the Lead EECOM, wanted a copy of the checklist, so that he could follow it as it was read up. Swigert was irritated by the delay; he knew that there had never been a checklist quite like this one, and he wanted to get on with the job of copying it. To pass the time, Brand recited the titles of the different checklists spread out on the console in front of him: one for the service-module jettison, one for the lunar-module jettison, and one for aligning the command module’s guidance platform. As Brand at last seemed about to start the readup, he broke off again, explaining that some more of the engineers who had worked on the checklist were coming into the Control Room. Deiterich, Reed, and Russell arrived from the ground floor, where they had been practicing exactly what they would be doing in the Trench as they guided the astronauts in. To the astronauts, the wait seemed interminable. The checklist was their only passport back to earth, and the earth was looking closer, and more solid, every minute. In reality, they were still about a hundred thousand miles away—not much more than halfway back—but they were travelling at four thousand miles an hour now, and the increasing pull of the earth’s gravity would get them back in about seventeen hours.

While Brand waited for the Tiger Team engineers to find seats, he “voiced up”—in the NASA phrase—some housekeeping details. Several more minutes passed, during which Brand asked Swigert for some read-outs from the battery that was charging, but before Swigert could comply Lovell burst in to say, “We can’t just wait around here to read the procedures all the time up to the burn! We’ve got to get them up here, look at them, and then we’ve got to get to sleep!” Brand said everybody should be ready to start the reading within five minutes; there weren’t enough copies of the checklist for all the engineers that had just come into the Control Room, and someone had gone to get more.

Kranz was aware that the astronauts were tired and impatient, but he went along with the delay. “I knew communications were getting terse,” he said later. “Everyone gets to that point. It’s nothing personal—just frustration. When you’re passing data to the crew, there’s no substitute for accuracy. It’s difficult to know what the proper trade-off is, but the key thing is to be right.”

At last a door opened and several more engineers entered the Control Room, bearing stacks of multilith copies of the checklist, and these were passed out. The last to enter was Lieutenant Commander Mattingly. The astronauts in the spacecraft kept tabs on his health by occasionally asking, “Are the flowers in bloom yet in Houston?” The flowers never did bloom. Mattingly, a tall, partly bald man, took a seat next to Brand at the CAPCOM console; he had just run the entire checklist through the CMS/LMS Integrator and presumably knew it better than anyone else, so, in violation of the usual procedure, he was to read it up. Brand gave him the microphone.

The readup to Swigert took almost two hours. “O.K., let me take it from the top here,” Mattingly began briskly. “It assumes that we’re getting LM power to Main Bus B in the command module.” He continued, “And the first item, then, after you get ready to start this checklist, is to install lithium-hydroxide canisters inside the command module. … On Panel 8, we want to turn the floodlights to ‘Fixed.’”

Swigert, who had already fallen behind, said, “O.K., wait a minute here. You’re going too fast.”

Mattingly’s main concern throughout the reading was to see to it that Swigert, who was exhausted, got things right. Mattingly slowed down, reading the checklist line by line and pausing at the end of each line to wait for Swigert to read it back for confirmation. For accuracy, Swigert wanted to copy every word, using few abbreviations, and this made the reading go even slower. The word used most frequently over the next three hours was “O.K.,” which prefaced each remark to confirm the last one.

“O.K. On Panel 250, circuit breaker, Battery A power entry, and post-landing closed,” Mattingly voiced up.

“O.K. Panel 250, CB Bat A power entry, and post-landing closed,” Swigert repeated.

“O.K. The same for circuit breaker, Battery B power entry, and post-landing,” Mattingly went on.

“O.K.,” Swigert repeated.

The material was detailed and tedious, and Swigert frequently had to ask Mattingly to repeat items. Once, Swigert broke off and said, “Ah, Ken, I—I didn’t get it. We had to change omnis again.” The spacecraft still rolled unpredictably, so that its omnidirectional antennas often lost contact and Swigert’s voice trailed off. Mattingly and the flight controllers following the transcript had to be constantly on the watch for errors, and, even so, as time went by errors inevitably crept in. Once Swigert erroneously copied down that a heater for the guidance platform should draw power from Main Bus A, which wouldn’t be powered up until later, and Mattingly had to correct him, telling him to plug it into Main Bus B.

After Mattingly read up the part of the checklist for jettisoning the LM, the pattern of the reading changed, for from this point the flight controllers had been able to borrow more from the original checklist for the mission, and accordingly Mattingly could tell Swigert, “Okay, on page nineteen, delete items one through five,” or “Cut from page three to page six.” This saved on penmanship for Swigert, who was getting writer’s cramp. Almost two hours after Mattingly started reading the command-module procedures, he reached the end. “Thank you. This does it, huh?” Swigert asked, exhausted. He wanted to know whether Mattingly had had any trouble with the checklist in the simulator, and Mattingly said there had been no problems, though the pace was bound to be wearing between the jettisoning of the service module and that of the LM.

When Mattingly was through with Swigert, he had to start over again and read up procedures for the LM to Haise. These were shorter, and he finished within an hour. It was almost 11 P.M., just six and a half hours before the astronauts would start putting the checklist to use. For the next two hours, the ground made no calls to the astronauts, in the hope that they would get some rest. On the ground, most members of the White Team went home to get what sleep they could before taking over the Control Room for the final descent. Other members of the team continued to fret about details. In their view, the checklist was not really finished; that would require another three months.

At two in the morning, Lousma, who had replaced Mattingly and Brand on the CAPCOM console, called up to the spacecraft. He had some changes that the engineers wanted to make in the checklist. Swigert answered sleepily.

“How much sleep did you get, Jack?” Lousma asked.

“Oh, I guess maybe two or three hours. It was awful cold, and it wasn’t very good sleep,” Swigert answered.

“You plan to try to get any more?” Lousma asked.

“Well, if I get everything done, I’ll try, but I’ll tell you, it’s almost impossible to sleep,” Swigert said. “All of us have that same problem. It’s just too cold to sleep We’ll try to sleep, but it’s just awful cold.”

Lousma’s call had awakened Haise and Lovell, too, and they were up now, rubbing their hands together for warmth. Lousma read up a couple of the checklist changes to Swigert, and then asked to talk to Haise; he had a couple of changes for him, too. Then Lousma had another change for Swigert, who had gone back to bed. Lovell, however, had had enough. He came on the radio saying, “O.K., Jack, this is Jim. I just want to make sure that any … of the changes to the checklist that come up, you make sure that they’re absolutely essential. When we don’t have procedures we can only do it one time, and we can’t make changes at the last minute. … Unless the changes are really essential, don’t bother sending them up.” At times, Lovell seemed more fretful than the others, perhaps because of his responsibilities as commander.

After Lovell’s outburst, Donald K. Slayton, the Director of Flight Crew Operations, came on the line. Slayton was one of the few men on the ground who were allowed to interrupt the CAPCOM, and he did so now, evidently, because he thought a strong hand was needed. He said, “I know that none of you are sleeping worth a damn, because it’s so cold, and you might want to dig out the medical kit there and pull out a couple of Dexedrine tablets apiece.” This was a prescription the Flight Surgeons had been considering for some time but had been reluctant to suggest, because Dexedrine is a powerful stimulant, which leaves one severely let down when it wears off. The astronauts were reluctant to take the Dexedrine, too, but they dutifully told Slayton—who, they knew, had a paternal interest—that they would do so. However, they did not take the pills until a couple of hours before splashdown, when they were so exhausted that the Dexedrine had no appreciable effect.

When Slayton had returned the microphone to the CAPCOM, Lousma said, “If we could figure a way to get a hot cup of coffee up to you, it would taste pretty good about now, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it sure would,” Lovell said. “You don’t realize how cold this thing gets.”

Lousma replied, “Hang in there. It won’t be long.”

At two-thirty in the morning—a bit less than ten hours before splashdown—Lousma radioed, “O.K., Skipper, we figured out a way for you to keep warm. We decided to start powering up the LM now.” The night before, the TELMUs had concluded that matters were going so well that they could loosen up some more on their consumables. The astronauts were told to turn on some of the equipment in the lunar module now, including the window heaters, which spread warmth rather in the manner of the defrosters in a car.

All three astronauts were up and about. “It’s going to be an interesting day,” Haise radioed. “The earth’s a lot bigger, and the crescent is a lot more pronounced than it was yesterday.”

The sun was shining brilliantly through the overhead window. Lovell remarked that it already seemed to be getting a little warmer in the LM. Lousma answered that duckblinds were always warmer when the birds were flying.

The White Team took over the third-floor Control Room shortly after four o’clock Friday morning, but most members of the team had come in long before that. Aaron had arrived a little after two to figure out what he would do if the command module used too much power (he called this kind of thinking “playing ‘what if’ games”), and Deiterich had come in at about the same time to draw up alternative maneuver PADs in case anything went wrong with the reëntry. When Reed arrived, around two-thirty, he went straight to the FIDO’s console to look at the latest vectors. Because of the continued shallowing of the trajectory, the RETROs had definitely decided on one more midcourse correction—MCC 7—to be done about four hours before entry interface. The idea was to alter the trajectory by first tilting the spacecraft and then firing forward, and since the shallowing was even greater than Reed had expected, he and Deiterich now decided to increase the burn from one and a half feet per second to two feet per second; the effect of the burn would be to steepen the reëntry angle.

At four, Kranz officially took over. His earphones had the longest cord in the room, because he liked to pace back and forth at tight moments. He would be doing a great deal of pacing during the next eight hours. Still, he looked surer of himself and more determined than he had the night of the accident; the square set of his jaw might have been that of a commander who had been routed in a sneak attack and had now returned to the scene with what he believed to be an overwhelming force. He claimed later that he had had no worries. “In our preparations, we never believed we couldn’t get the men back,” he said. “I thought that as a group we were smart enough, and clever enough, to get out of the problem.” However that may have been, almost every one of his flight controllers would have a problem during the next eight hours that he wasn’t at all sure he could get out of. Most of the flight controllers were closer than Kranz to specific parts of the spacecraft, and were therefore apt to be more concerned when something went amiss. Kranz was generally able to take a longer view, and in this he may have been helped by his position in the Control Room—in the third row, a little behind and a little above the others.

Lovell said later that he could never forget for an instant that “we had a dead service module, we had a command module but it had no power in it, and we had a lunar module that was a wonderful vehicle but it didn’t have a heat shield.” The spacecraft was indeed in what Lovell called “an unusual configuration,” and there wasn’t much time to set it right. It was only fifty-eight thousand miles from earth now, and its velocity had increased to fifty-nine hundred miles an hour. In the next eight hours, this figure would more than quadruple. Contemplating the universe in man’s usual egocentric way, Swigert told the CAPCOM that the earth—rather than the spacecraft—was whistling in like a high-speed freight train.

When Kranz took charge of the Control Room, he was surprised to find that the astronauts were aligning the LM’s guidance platform on the sun and moon. According to the checklist, the LM’s Primary Guidance and Navigation System, of which the platform was a part, was not supposed to be powered up—only the LM’s secondary guidance system. What had happened was that during the night the TELMUs had found themselves to be what they called “fat on power,” and had told the previous shift that it would be O.K. to bring up both of the LM’s guidance systems. In one way, Kranz was pleased, because if the astronauts could get a good alignment on the LM’s guidance platform now, they could transfer it to the command module later—as they had done in reverse the night of the accident—and this would save time during the most crowded part of the timeline. He didn’t object to alterations in the checklist; it was not binding if a better way of doing something came along. What did bother Kranz was that, now that the primary system was up, the FIDO and the RETRO would want to use it for the MCC 7 burn, which was a couple of hours away. He suspected he would have an argument on his hands from the Control Officers, who would maintain that there wasn’t enough fuel for that; they would want to stick with the more economical secondary system, as stipulated in the checklist. The issue was important. To save the command module’s power and fuel, the LM would be performing all the spacecraft’s maneuvers until it was jettisoned, six hours from then, and since there would be a lot of maneuvering, the Control Officers would be quite right in wanting to hang on to the LM’s propellants.

Just as Kranz expected, he got a call from Reed, the Lead FIDO, who asked if there was any chance of using the primary system for the midcourse correction, because it would make for a more precise burn. Kranz said that he would consider it but that first he had to check with the CONTROL. TO his surprise, the CONTROL on duty (the Lead CONTROL, Harold Loden, was not present) gave his approval. Kranz then checked with Russell, the Lead GUIDO, who also went along with the idea, so Kranz gave Reed permission to use the primary system, though he wasn’t sure he had heard the end of the matter. Kranz liked to arrive at decisions by consensus, but as he asked a question here, answered one there, and passed an instruction to the CAPCOM to transmit to the astronauts, there could be no doubt that he was the center of the whole operation. As a rule, the conversation on the loop was terse, with long silences. Kranz’s eye would rove around the room, and every once in a while he would seek information from one man or another. Once, he broke the silence to ask the CONTROL how he was coming; the CONTROL answered that the astronauts had already begun to use the LM’s primary guidance system to hold the spacecraft at the proper attitude. After another silence, Kranz asked Deiterich if he was satisfied with the way the crew had stowed equipment in the command module for balance the day before; Deiterich said he was.

After another, longer silence, Kranz asked Peters, the Lead T...