Apollo 13

James Lovell, Jeffrey Kluger

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780547526232
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

NATIONAL BESTSELLER. Astronaut Jim Lovell and coauthor Jeffrey Kluger's harrowing account of the Apollo 13 disaster. Serving as the basis for Ron Howard's blockbuster Apollo 13, the book reveals true details not shown in the movie. Thrilling and evocative, you feel as though you're alongside Lovell in the lunar module.
Written with all the color and drama of the best fiction, Apollo 13 tells the full story of the moon shot that almost ended in catastrophe. Minutes after a mid-flight explosion, the three astronauts are forced to abandon the main ship for the lunar module, a tiny craft designed to keep two men alive for just two days.?
As the hours tick away, the narrative shifts from the crippled spacecraft to Mission Control, from engineers searching desperately for a way to fix the ship to Lovell's wife and children praying for his safe return. The entire nation watches as one crisis after another is met and overcome. By the time the ship splashes down in the Pacific, we understand why the heroic effort to rescue Lovell and his crew is considered by many to be NASA's finest hour.?
Inspiring and astonishing, the story of Apollo 13 is a timeless tribute to the enduring American spirit and sparkling individual heroism.

1

January 27, 1967

JIM LOVELL was having dinner at the White House when his friend Ed White burned to death.

Actually, it wasn’t really dinner Lovell was having, just finger sandwiches, orange juice, and unmemorable wine laid out on linen-covered tables in the Green Room. But being that the sun had already gone down and no other time was formally set aside for chow that day, this was as close to dinner as Lovell was going to get.

Actually, too, Ed White didn’t really burn to death. The fumes claimed him long before the flames ever could have. By most estimates, it was only fifteen seconds before he—along with his commander, Gus Grissom, and his junior crewmate, Roger Chaffee—succumbed to the poisons they were drawing into their lungs. In the end, it might have been for the best. Nobody knew exactly how hot it got inside the cockpit, but with a flame-feeding atmosphere of 100 percent pure oxygen, it was a good bet that the thermometer climbed above 1,400 degrees. At that temperature, copper glows, aluminum melts, and zinc can burst into flame. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee—fragile agglomerations of skin and hair and flesh and bone—wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Jim Lovell had no way of knowing what was happening to the three men at the moment it was happening. He would know soon, but at the moment he didn’t. At the moment, Lovell was concerned with the job in front of him, and that job was to circulate and socialize and shake some hands. There were dozens of dignitaries gathering around to scarf up the White House’s snacks and drinks, and it was Lovell’s business to say hello to as many of them as possible. The guest pass Lovell had been sent in the mail was very specific about this part of the job:

“Green and Blue Rooms for individual pic with ambassadors and handshake,” it said. It didn’t say “You’re invited here for the food”; it didn’t say “You’re invited here for the fun.” It said, in so many words, “You’re invited here—if you must know—to work the crowd.”

Lovell was not unaccustomed to this kind of evening, of course, and the candor of the invitation was no surprise. This was just more of what he and the other members of the astronaut corps called their “time in the barrel”: those occasions when some chief of state or chamber of commerce needed a showpiece spaceman to round out a reception and NASA would dispatch a crewman or two to attend the party, pose for pictures with the host, and generally spread goodwill. All of the astronauts were good at this drill, but Lovell was especially good. At 5 feet 11 inches and 170 pounds, with mainstream midwestern looks, he projected an almost archetypal astronaut image, perfect for the VIP who wanted just the right photo to complete his office wall. This evening, there would be fewer opportunities for such photos than most. The invitation called for the event to begin promptly at 5:14 P.M.—it actually said 5:14—and conclude no later than 6:45. What the White House was hoping to achieve with an extra 60 seconds at the front end of the evening was unclear, but all Lovell and the other four crewmen here tonight had to do was work the crowd for the 91 minutes they’d be on call, then they’d be free to go enjoy Washington.

Truth be told, if Lovell had to put in an hour and a half or so in the barrel, there were worse places to do it than the White House. Lyndon Johnson, who was always at his best at nibble-and-gab sessions like these, was here, and Lovell looked forward to saying hello to the president. The two had met once before, just a month or so earlier when Lovell and his copilot Buzz Aldrin were invited down to the ranch for a medal and a speech after their Gemini 12 spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic, ending the triumphantly successful ten-flight run of the tiny craft.

In the deepest part of his deepest heart Lovell had felt that a medal might not actually be warranted. It wasn’t politic to say so, but he had thought so. It wasn’t as if the flight hadn’t been a huge accomplishment; it was. It wasn’t as if it hadn’t achieved all the goals the mission planners had set out for it, and more; it had. But the nine previous flights had achieved most of their goals too, and if it weren’t for the astronautical expertise accumulated on Geminis 3 through 11, Gemini 12 would never have been possible. Johnson, however, had a taste for high drama, and as this final Gemini flight unfolded—as Lovell docked his two-man spacecraft with an unmanned Agena spacecraft as effortlessly as if he were pulling a Pontiac into a parking space; as Buzz climbed outside and rode the back of the Agena like a dickey bird on a rhino’s back—the president became more and more pleased with his multi-billion-dollar space program. No sooner had Lovell and Aldrin plopped back into the ocean than Johnson called out the photographers and proclamation writers and had the heroes down for a ceremony and a little south Texas hospitality.

After that, Lovell had a soft spot for the president and counted himself among Johnson’s most enthusiastic admirers. But even if there were no chief executive here today, this reception would be one worth attending. The purpose of the evening was to celebrate the signing of the much debated, prosaically named “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space.” As treaties went, Lovell knew this was not a truly big deal; it wasn’t Versailles, it wasn’t Appomattox, it wasn’t a nuclear test ban. It was one of those treaties that come about because, as the diplomats say, “something should be put on paper.”

That something had to do with space—specifically, the boundaries that define space. Since the first proto-nation drew the first line in the soil of the first populated savanna, countries had been steadily, greedily extending their boundaries. It began with a circle around the campfire, then it was a zone from the campfire to the coast, then it was from the coast out to a three-mile line in the ocean. In the last ten years, since the dawn of the space age, the three miles had changed to two hundred miles, the direction had changed from out to up, and the world’s nations had been fretting about if and how the lines would continue to be drawn in this most exotic of new frontiers.

The pact being signed today by more than five dozen countries would see to it that there were no lines. Among its provisions were guarantees that outer space would remain forever nonmilitarized, that no country would declare any Earth orbital zone as its own, and that land claims would never be made on the moon, Mars, or any other place humanity’s rockets might one day reach. More important to Lovell and the other astronauts here tonight, however, was article 5 of the document—the safe return of space travelers clause. This provision guaranteed that any astronauts or cosmonauts who veered off course and splashed down in a hostile ocean or thumped down in a hostile wheat field would not be scooped up and carted off by security forces of the violated country. Rather, they would be treated as “envoys of mankind,” to be “safely and promptly returned to the state of registry of their space vehicle.”

In picking the astronaut delegation tonight, NASA had chosen carefully. In addition to Lovell, who had flown twice in the Gemini program, was Neil Armstrong, a veteran NASA test pilot, whose sole Gemini flight, Gemini 8, had ended in near disaster ten months earlier when one of his thrusters suddenly went south on him, causing his ship to begin spinning at a stomach-knotting 500 r.p.m. and forcing flight controllers to abort the mission and bring him down in the first ocean or sea or duck pond they could find. Also on hand was Scott Carpenter, whose Mercury flight had gone almost as haywire five years earlier when he spent too much time in his final orbit monkeying around with some onboard astronomy experiment, aligned his retrorockets improperly, and splashed down in the Atlantic 250 miles from his recovery crew. While the Navy scrambled this way and that, the second American to orbit the Earth found himself bobbing in his life raft, nibbling his ration crackers, and scanning the horizon for a ship he fervently hoped would be flying the Stars and Stripes.

Both Armstrong and Carpenter could have used the protection of the treaty during their flights, and this no doubt was on NASA’s mind when it sent them here tonight. The other two members of the delegation, Gordon Cooper and Dick Gordon, were tougher to explain, though it was likely that NASA had simply spun its dial and picked the first two names that came up.

Lovell got a brief hello from Johnson almost as soon as the reception began—just a brief hello, nothing like the presidential fawning of only a month earlier—and wandered to the buffet table to get a sandwich and survey the minefield of milling dignitaries. The room would be a big one to work. Kurt Waldheim was here from Austria; Ambassador Patrick Dean had come from Great Britain; Anatoly Dobrynin strolled over from the Soviet embassy; Dean Rusk, Averell Harriman, and Arthur Goldberg were on hand for the United States. The presence of so many geopolitical giants was catnip for legislators from Capitol Hill as well. Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen, Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, and Senators Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale of Minnesota were here, as well as other Washington heavyweights who had wangled invitations of their own.

Lovell was about to wade into the crowd when he noticed Dobrynin standing to his right. The Soviet ambassador had a solid reputation among the astronauts who had met him before. He was said to be an accomplished student of both the American and Soviet space programs, a good-natured fellow who spoke first-rate English, and a man who, on the whole, did not at all fit the image of a representative of the socialist superstate. Lovell extended his hand.

“Mr. Ambassador?” he said. “Jim Lovell.”

The ambassador broke into a grin. “Ah, Jim Lovell,” Dobrynin said. “Nice to meet you. You’re the, uh . . .”

The expectant trail-off at the end of Dobrynin’s sentence, of course, was Lovell’s cue to say “astronaut,” after which Dobrynin would nod vigorously and smile easily, as if to say, “Yes, yes, I know what you are, I just forgot the English word.” Lovell suspected he could just as easily answer, “shortstop” or “sculptor” or “professional wrestler” and Dobrynin would react the same way.

“Astronaut, Mr. Ambassador.”

Dobrynin responded immediately. “Yes, you’re the one who just came back. A wonderful flight, a real accomplishment.”

Lovell smiled, impressed. “Well, we’re working hard to keep up with you folks.”

“Maybe one day we won’t have to compete so much,” Dobrynin said. “Maybe this treaty is the first step toward working peacefully together.”

“We certainly hope so. It would be nice if all humanity could explore the moon one day.”

“I don’t know if I’ll get there,” the diplomat said. “But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you do.”

“That’s what I’m working toward,” Lovell said.

“The best of luck.” With that, the ambassador shook Lovell’s hand and moved off into the throng to find other people to charm.

Lovell turned in the other direction and spied Hubert Humphrey, deep in conversation with Carpenter and Gordon. As he approached, he could hear the vice president’s characteristically nasal voice going on in its characteristically engaging way.

“This is a landmark treaty, just a landmark,” Humphrey was saying as Lovell reached them. “Everybody wins, even countries that don’t have a space program, because now the superpowers won’t militarize the areas beyond Earth.”

“The astronauts have always thought that was a great idea,” Carpenter said, echoing the NASA party line, but one he wholeheartedly believed. “For a long time there’s been a lot of camaraderie between American crewmen and Russian crewmen. We’ve always thought the peaceful exploration of space is bigger than any one country.”

“Much bigger,” Humphrey agreed.

“What the astronauts are most worried about,” Lovell said after introducing himself, “is the safety question. It would be nice to know that we could fly over any country, even a hostile country, and be guaranteed a cordial reception if we have to abort.”

“That’s one of the biggest objectives of this treaty,” the vice president answered. “The safety of the astronauts.”

The crewmen made party talk with Humphrey for another minute or two, just long enough to register on the administration that NASA’s goodwill ambassadors were doing their jobs, just short enough to give other guests a chance at the vice president. The three men were about to disperse to greet more visitors when Lovell became suddenly troubled. The mention of crew safety had brought a forgotten worry to mind.

“What time did they start the countdown at the Cape today?” Lovell asked Gordon as they walked off.

“Early afternoon,” Gordon answered.

Lovell looked at his watch: it was shortly after six. “So they should be finished soon,” he said. “Good.”

The test Lovell was concerned about was no small matter. Today NASA had scheduled a full-scale dress rehearsal of the countdown for the first mission of the Apollo spacecraft, set to begin three weeks from now. If things had gone as planned, at this moment the three-man crew would be zipped into their pressure suits, strapped to their seats, and locked behind their command module’s hatch, sealed in a 16-pound-per-square-inch atmosphere of pure oxygen. Lovell himself had gone through such tests countless times in preparation for his Gemini 12 flight, his two-week Gemini 7 flight, and the two other Gemini missions on which he had served as part of the backup crew. There was nothing inherently dangerous about a countdown test, yet if you asked anyone at the Agency, they’d tell you they couldn’t wait until this one was over.

The worry wasn’t the crew, of course. The commander, Gus Grissom, had flown in space in both the Mercury and Gemini programs and had run through these counterfeit countdowns dozens of times. The pilot, Ed White, had flown in Gemini too, and had also had more than his share of pad training. Even the junior pilot, Roger Chaffee, who had never been in space, was rigorously tutored in the art of flight rehearsal. No, the worry in this exercise was the ship.

The Apollo spacecraft, by even the most charitable estimations, was turning out to be an Edsel. Actually, among the astronauts it was thought of as worse than an Edsel. An Edsel is a clunker, but an essentially harmless clunker. Apollo was downright dangerous. Earlier in the development and testing of the craft, the nozzle of the ship’s giant engine—the one that would have to function perfectly to place the moonship in lunar orbit and blast it on its way home again—shattered like a teacup when engineers tried to fire it. During a splashdown test, the heat shield of the craft had split open, causing the command module to sink like a $35 million anvil to the bottom of a factory test pool. The environmental control system had already logged 200 individual failures; the spacecraft as a whole had accumulated roughly 20,000. During one checkout run at the manufacturing plant, a disgusted Gus Grissom walked away from the command module after leaving a lemon perched atop it.

Yesterday afternoon, so the whispers went, all of this finally reached a head. For much of the day, Wally Schirra—a veteran of Mercury and Gemini, and commander of the backup crew that would replace Grissom, White, and Chaffee if anything happened to them—ran through an identical countdown test with his crew, Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele. When the trio climbed out of the ship, sweaty and fatigued after six long hours, Schirra made it clear that he was not pleased with what he had seen.

“I don’t know, Gus,” Schirra said when he met later with Grissom and Apollo program manager Joe Shea in the crew’s quarters at the Cape, “there’s nothing wrong with this ship that I can point to, but it just makes me uncomfortable. Something about it doesn’t ring right.”

Saying that a craft of any kind didn’t “ring” was one of the most worrisome reports one test pilot could offer another. The term conjured up the image of a subtly cracked bell that looks more or less O.K. on the surface but emits a flat clack instead of a resonant gong when struck by its clapper. Better that the craft should go to pieces when you try to fly it—that its engine nozzle should drop off, say, or its thrusters break away; at least you’d know what to fix. But a ship that doesn’t ring right could get you in a thousand insidious ways. “If you have any problem,” Schirra told his colleague, “I’d get out.”

Grissom was almost certainly disturbed by the report, but he reacted to Schirra’s warning with surprising nonchalance. “I’ll keep an eye on it,” he said.

The problem, as many people knew, was that Gus had “go fever”: he was itching to fly this spacecraft. Sure there were glitches in the ship, but that’s what test pilots were for, to find the glitches and work them out. And even if there was a problem, just getting out—as Schirra had suggested—wouldn’t be so easy. The Apollo’s hatch was a three-layer sandwich assembly designed less to permit easy escape than to maintain the integrity of the craft. The inner cover was equipped with a sealed drive, a rack-drive bar, and six latches that clamped onto the module’s walls. The next cover was even more complicated, equipped with bell cranks, rollers, push-pull rods, an over-center lock, and twenty-two latches. Before liftoff, the entire craft was also surrounded by a form-fitting “boost protective cover,” a layer of armor that would shield it from the aerodynamic stresses of powered ascent. The cover was meant to pop off well before the spacecraft reached orbit, but until then, it provided one more layer between the crew inside and a rescue team outside. Under the best conditions, astronauts and rescue crews working together could remove all three hatches in about ninety seconds. Under adverse conditions, it could take much longer.

Standing in the White House Green Room, Lovell glanced at his watch. In half an hour or so the test would be over. He’d be relieved to get word that his friends were out of that ship.

On Florida’s Atlantic coast, a thousand miles south, the countdown at Cape Kennedy was not going well. From the time the crew members were strapped into their seats, at about one in the afternoon, the Apollo spacecraft had begun fulfilling its critics’ worst expectations. When Grissom first plugged his suit hose into the command module’s oxygen supply, he reported a “sour smell” flowing into his helmet. The odor soon dissipated and the environmental control team promised they’d look into it. Shortly afterward, and throughout the day, the astronauts ...