Just then, the TELMU reported another burst of telemetry from the LM, indicating that it hadn’t burned up yet. “How about that?” said Kranz, with the only trace of astonishment he had betrayed since the accident. Like mariners, flight controllers prefer to think of favored craft as sailing on and on forever. After this short burst of telemetry, though, nothing more was heard from the LM.
Astronauts and flight controllers are generally uneasy when it comes to expressing their feelings. Now, as the spacecraft raced on toward entry interface, there were long silences, and Swigert ended one of them by saying, “I know all of us here want to thank all you guys down there for the very fine job you did.”
Lovell added, “That’s affirm.”
Kerwin replied, “Tell you—we all had a good time doing it.”
It might have been the end of any agreeable guided tour.
The flight controllers picked at details like mother hens until the last minute. Aaron sent word to the astronauts that one of the reëntry batteries would give out at about the time the main parachutes opened but that they shouldn’t worry, because there would be enough electricity in the other two. A little later, Aaron sent another message: If they landed off target and needed more electricity to power the radio beacon, there was a little extra supply stashed away in the small battery that powered the pyros. Kranz felt it was time to go around the room once more to see if everyone was ready for entry interface—not that there was much to be done now if anyone wasn’t.
“O.K., fellows, last time around the horn,” he said. “How we looking, GNC?”
“Good.”
“EECOM?”
“Good.”
“GUIDO?”
“Go.”
“FIDO?”
“Go.”
“RETRO?”
“Go, Flight,” Deiterich said. The trajectory had continued to shallow until it was just a twentieth of a degree above the point where the lift vector would have to be changed; then the shallowing ceased.
“Good,” said Kranz. He had made it round the horn even faster than before, for, with the LM gone, he hadn’t needed to poll the TELMU or the CONTROL. Kranz said to Kerwin, “We’re go, CAPCOM.”
“We just had one last time around the room, and everybody says you’re looking great,” Kerwin said to Lovell.
Lovell said, “Thank you.”
A little earlier, Swigert had told Kerwin he had a good bedside manner, and this may have been closer to the way he felt now, given everyone’s unstated concern about the heat shield. In the first thin traces of the atmosphere, a purple-pink glow surrounded the spacecraft, moving backward from the shield in the manner of a gas fire being turned up slowly beneath a pot. Swigert said his mood fitted the colors. Shortly, the flames enveloped the capsule, so that the flight controllers lost contact with the astronauts. The flames trailed hundreds of miles behind the spacecraft, like the wake of a ship. The flight controllers stared silently at the front of the Control Room, where projected on the big television screen was a view—relayed by satellite from the Iwo Jima—of the sky the astronauts would be coming down through. The weather was nearly perfect. Deiterich gloated, for the storm that the weathermen had been warning him about for three days had moved off; it had moved, in fact, to the precise spot to which they had wanted him to shift the landing site.
After three minutes of blackout, Kranz put through a call to Deiterich to find out how much longer they had to wait. Deiterich said it should be over in another thirty seconds. At the end of the thirty seconds, there was still no word from the astronauts, and Deiterich began to get concerned. Thirty seconds later, the astronauts still hadn’t reported in, and Deiterich was alarmed. Blackouts didn’t always end on time, but this one was already excessively long. Kranz asked the Network Officer whether the spacecraft’s radio beacon had been acquired. It hadn’t been. Another thirty seconds went by, and Kranz asked Kerwin to put in a call to the spacecraft. “Odyssey, Houston. Standing by,” Kerwin said. There was no answer. Everyone was beginning to despair.
Then, five seconds later, Swigert called in—“O.K., Joe.” He sounded exhilarated and relieved. He was a minute and forty-five seconds late—one of the longest delays in any Apollo blackout. Kerwin told Swigert he read him. None of the flight controllers said a word.
It was nine minutes until splashdown. At twenty-four thousand feet, the two small drogue parachutes popped out to slow the craft, like sea anchors dragging against a current. On television, the flight controllers could see the spacecraft now. The drogues were reefed, but, as they watched, the reefs fell off and the drogues billowed. So good was the weather, and so close had the spacecraft come to its target, that this was the first time the flight controllers in Houston had seen this happen. Soon the drogues were released and three more small parachutes took their place, each one pulling behind it a vast parachute—the three main ones. These, too, were reefed, and as the reefs slipped out in two stages, the chutes appeared to grow like rocket bursts welcoming a ship to port. The astronauts touched down at 12:07 P.M. Houston time. The flight controllers cheered.
After the astronauts were safely aboard the Iwo Jima, the flight controllers applauded again and lit cigars, as they always do at the end of a flight. One of them mounted a stepladder and attached the Apollo 13 emblem to the wall alongside the insignia of other missions successfully brought home—it was a troika of horses dashing over a gray-and-white moon, with the sun just behind them and the earth, all whites and browns and blues, hanging invitingly in the background. Most of the flight controllers went on to the splashdown party, at the Officers’ Club at Ellington Air Force Base, as soon as they had shut down their consoles. Kranz felt reluctant to leave the men he had been working with; it always took a little time to get away from a spaceflight, and the more demanding the flight had been the more time it took. Russell said later he was surprised at how long it took for his adrenalin to go down; the problems had been so vast in comparison with what he thought of as “the little gremlin-type problems” he normally got during a mission. Reed, too, expected to unwind at the party, but he did not. He was so cranked up that his mind wouldn’t stop working. Five days later, he was still walking around in what he called a “shocked mode.”
In spite of all those extra amounts of adrenalin, the flight controllers’ party was not the “wild one” that Kerwin and Swigert had spoken of; in fact, Swigert didn’t miss a thing. Everyone was almost too exhausted to move. Aaron had two drinks and was home in bed by six that evening. Deiterich drank a couple of beers, picked up his wife and took her out for a hamburger, and went home. Spencer, another RETRO, had a drink, went out for a pizza, and went home. Liebergot, the EECOM who had been on duty at the time of the accident, left the party early, too. Two weeks later, he said there had not been a single night when he hadn’t dreamed about the undervoltage on Main Bus B.
When the astronauts boarded the Iwo Jima, a band struck up “Aquarius.” After a short welcoming ceremony, Haise told the ship’s captain that it was nice to be warm again, and Swigert said, “It was so damn cold.” This was uncharacteristic talk for an astronaut, and a few weeks later, after he had had time to think things over in the warmth of the South Pacific and then Houston, Swigert was to deny ever having been particularly uncomfortable in the spacecraft. Haise would later liken the discomfort to that on a camping trip through the north woods without adequate clothing. Yet the frogmen who met them commented that they could still feel the chill of space through the command module’s open hatch.
Belowdecks, in the sick bay, Lovell, Swigert, and Haise were given all the fruit juices they could drink. They didn’t have the appearance of most of the returning crews the attending physicians had seen before, and a quick post-flight examination revealed them to be in worse shape than any other returning astronauts. They were unsteady on their feet and their reflexes were slow. They did worse than any of their predecessors on their orthostatic tests, which measured the pooling of blood at the feet—an aftereffect of space travel whi
ch is exacerbated by exhaustion. Their supply of electrolytes was significantly down, and so was their circulating level of adrenal steroids—secretions that provided an index of the extent to which the astronauts had been working from nervous energy. Before going to sleep, one of them told one of the doctors he just didn’t know how much longer they could have kept on going.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WANT TO THANK those astronauts and flight controllers of Apollo 13 who gave me their stories and who later took the time to make sure I got them straight.
Many others have had a hand in this book. In particular, William Shawn, the Editor of The New Yorker, first had the idea that the Apollo 13 mission might offer the best glimpse into the anatomy of a spaceflight and especially into the workings of “those men who sit at those desks” in the Mission Control Room—the flight controllers, whom nobody seemed to know much about. Later, William Knapp and Anne Britchky wrestled with proofs and made sure everything was in order.
Several others helped me at the Manned Spaceflight Center outside Houston, among them Milton Reim and Terry White of the Public Affairs Office, who aimed me in the right direction and made sure the doors were open when I got there. Finally, my thanks go to Robert Cornfield at The Dial Press, who must have wondered from time to time whether there would be a manuscript at all.
New York, N.Y.
Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.
December 1972
About the Author
Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. is the author of eight books about NASA and space exploration, and was a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker. He lives in Cooperstown, New York.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
The material in this book appeared originally in the New Yorker magazine in slightly different form.
Copyright © 1972 by Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-6219-9
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Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed Page 15