by Tod Olson
Barbara, what did you think of the launch?
Barbara, how’s your mother doing?
Barbara, what’s the mood like at home?
She was shy—the kind of shy that made you hang back so much that people thought you were a snob. Most of the time she had no idea what to say to the reporters.
For now, at least, she didn’t have to say a thing. Barbara sat with her family and Mary Haise and peered down at the engineers hunched over their computer screens. It was 7:24 p.m. Houston time when the cramped cockpit of her father’s spacecraft flickered onto a big screen on the wall.
Two hundred thousand miles away, Barbara’s father and Fred Haise gave a tour of the spacecraft and an introduction to life in zero gravity. Haise floated around the lunar module, showing it off to the audience back at home. In two days, the LEM, as it was called, would detach from the rest of the spacecraft and take Haise and Lovell down to the surface of the moon while Swigert waited for them in orbit. On-screen, Haise tried to settle himself on a long piece of cloth stretched across the tiny compartment.
“Now we can see Fred engaged in his favorite pastime,” Lovell said.
“He’s not in the food locker, is he?” asked Jack Lousma, the Capsule Communicator, or CAPCOM, who was on the line in Houston.
“That’s his second-favorite pastime,” Lovell said. “Now he’s rigging his hammock for sleep on the lunar surface.”
Lovell moved to a window in the lunar module and zoomed in on the moon. They were still about 40,000 miles away but closing in at 2,000 miles per hour.
“I can see quite distinctly some of the features with the naked eye,” said Haise. “So far, though, it’s still looking pretty gray, with some white spots.”
It was all very casual. The crew even had nicknames for the main parts of the ship. They called the LEM Aquarius, after a boy from Greek mythology who supposedly carried water to the gods. The command module went by Odyssey. Lovell had seen a dictionary definition of the word and liked it: “a long voyage marked by many changes of fortune.”
After 25 minutes of banter, Lovell made his way back into Odyssey. He showed off a floating tape recorder with piano jazz playing on it—a playlist for a trip to the moon.
Then he stopped in mid-sentence with a tense “Stand by …”
A second later, Haise’s voice came across the line: “Yeah, I got ’em with the cabin repress valve again there, Jack.”
“Every time he does that, our hearts jump into our mouths,” Lovell said.
A few seconds later, he wished the residents of planet Earth a nice evening and signed off.
In Houston, Barbara watched the image of her father flicker out on the big screen. Then she went back to the car with her mother and sister. A public affairs officer from NASA led them out—during the flights, there was always someone with a NASA badge shadowing them.
Outside, the reporters were waiting. Thank goodness her mother was there to run interference. Marilyn Lovell recited the answers like she was reading a script: We’re very excited about the flight … happy for Jim … grateful for the brilliant people at NASA.
Then the family headed home. It was Monday, after all; Barbara and Susan had school the next day.
While the Earth-bound Lovells drove home, the astronauts returned to the business of flying to the moon. Mission Control had a few tasks for them before they went to sleep for the night. Lousma ordered the crew to roll the spacecraft right and check the thrusters, which they did.
For the final task, Swigert located a switch that would stir the ship’s oxygen and hydrogen tanks. The tanks were housed in the service module, a 25-foot-long cylinder attached to the wide base of the command module. The service module served as the ship’s all-purpose engine room and essential supply cabinet. The crew had no access to it, but their lives depended on its contents. The service module contained the main engine, the electrical power supply, and enough breathable oxygen for three men to get to the moon and back. The oxygen and hydrogen were stored at extremely low temperatures that turned the gases into a kind of slush. The slush needed to be stirred from time to time in order to measure how full the tanks were.
Swigert, strapped to his seat, threw the switch to stir the tanks. Lovell drifted around the command module, attending to his duties. Haise was halfway through the hatch, returning from the lunar module.
A minute and a half into the stir, a loud metallic thud rang through the ship. Lovell flinched. Then he got mad. He looked over at Haise, thinking the rookie must have pulled another prank with the repress valve. But Haise looked back at him with wide, frightened eyes.
“It wasn’t me,” he said.
Swigert looked clueless, too.
Had the spacecraft been hit by a fragment of an asteroid? At the speeds they were traveling, it wouldn’t take more than a pebble to tear a hole in the ship and start the nightmare scenario in motion. But if that’s what had happened, it would be over by now—and they were all still alive.
Alive, but in some kind of trouble.
Amber warning lights began to flash on the right side of the instrument panel. Something was wrong with the electrical system.
Haise and Swigert both tried to report at once.
“Okay, Houston …”
“… I believe we’ve had a problem here.”
A few seconds went by.
“This is Houston,” said the CAPCOM, “say again please.”
It was Lovell who answered this time. “Houston,” he said, “we’ve had a problem.”
CHAPTER 1
RACE TO OUTER SPACE
As jobs go, astronaut was a dangerous one. In fact, when Jim Lovell was first picked as a candidate by NASA, it seemed downright suicidal.
It was early February 1959, more than eleven years before Apollo 13 took off for the moon. Lovell was thirty years old. He had just finished test pilot training at the Pax River naval base in Maryland, where he’d graduated first in his class. His career looked good, and his family was growing. Barbara was five, his son Jay three, and little Susan just a baby.
The orders came on a Wednesday, in top secret navy jargon. Lovell was to show up in Washington, D.C., the next morning for something having to do with “Special Projects Matters.” Dress in a business suit, no military markings. Tell no one where he was going, not even his wife.
The next day, Lovell found himself in a conference room with thirty-four men who looked a lot like him. They all had military buzz cuts and wore suits dug out of the backs of closets. They stood no taller than 5’11” and weighed no more than 180 pounds. Every one of them was a test pilot.
Standing before them was a man with a big, balding forehead and the look of a college professor. He was Robert Gilruth, head of the Space Task Group in a new organization called NASA. Gilruth’s job was stressful enough to make anyone lose his hair. He had to put a human being in orbit around the Earth, and he had to do it before the Soviet Union did.
At the time, the Soviet Union and the United States were as close to war as two countries could get without actually dropping bombs on each other. It was a tense, worldwide rivalry known as the Cold War. The two countries spent billions of dollars building nuclear weapons to terrify each other into submission. Sixteen months before the secret meeting Lovell attended in Washington, the Soviets had extended the “battlefield” of the Cold War—into space.
On October 4, 1957, a Soviet rocket designed to carry bombs blasted a 184-pound metal ball out of Earth’s atmosphere at 17,000 miles an hour. The ball was a satellite called Sputnik 1. It was the first human-made object ever to leave the 60-mile-thick layer of gases that supports life on Earth. This floating metal beach ball carried no explosives. It contained no spy cameras. It simply circled the globe every 98 minutes, sending out a radio signal. But to many Americans, the steady beep of that signal was the sound of time running out.
Sputnik looked like it could be the first step in a brand-new kind of war. A rocket powerful enough to blast something into
space could surely carry a bomb from Moscow to Washington, D.C., in no time at all. And imagine what would happen if the Soviets put dozens of Sputniks in orbit, each one armed not with a radio transmitter, but a nuclear warhead. “It is quite possible that an aggressor nation who dominates space will dominate the world,” announced the famous American air force general Jimmy Doolittle. “We just can’t let that happen.”
That fear was why Jim Lovell and thirty-four other test pilots sat in a conference room in the winter of 1959 disguised as civilians. They were part of a pool from which NASA would choose the first seven Americans to leave the atmosphere and fly into space.
But the way NASA planned to do it, as Gilruth described it, sounded like an invitation to their own funerals. The engineers weren’t building a jet-powered plane to fly into space and back on its own power. That would take years, and no one wanted to give the Soviets that kind of lead in what everyone was now calling the Space Race. Instead, NASA planned to use a missile already developed for carrying bombs. But instead of a bomb, they would attach a tiny capsule to the top of the missile and stick a test pilot inside. Then they would blast the capsule into space from NASA’s launch site on the Atlantic coast of Florida and let it parachute back down to Earth. This plan was known as Project Mercury.
Jim Lovell did not make the cut for Mercury. He watched from the sidelines while NASA got the program off the ground—or tried to. In 1960 and 1961, the missile that was supposed to carry the first astronauts into space—the Atlas—went through almost seventy tests. Nearly half of them ended in failure. And when the Atlas failed, it failed in spectacular fashion. Some of the test rockets hovered hopefully 20 feet above the ground before collapsing into massive fireballs. Others lifted straight and high and looked like a grand success. Then they wobbled, turned abruptly, and headed for Orlando or Miami or a gallery of spectators who had gathered to watch the launch. Tense seconds followed until the wayward missiles were blown to pieces by remote control.
Were they really going to put a human being on top of that thing and blast him into space?
The best-trained engineers in the country were making it up as they went along. And even if they succeeded, it wasn’t entirely clear that human beings could survive in space. After all, there was no gravity in Earth orbit. Scientists thought an extended stay out there might ruin an astronaut’s middle ear, which would mean a life of dizziness back on Earth. Or worse, the circulatory system could refuse to pump blood without the pressure of gravity surrounding it.
There was no question that astronaut was one of the most dangerous jobs you could find. Jim Lovell knew that. But it was still the job he wanted.
Lovell had been hooked on flight since high school, when he made rockets out of cardboard tubes and homemade gunpowder and watched them explode in midair just like the Atlas. And was flying in space really more dangerous than test-piloting jet fighters? When you flew tricky maneuvers at 400 miles an hour, all it took was one loose bolt or leaky fuel line, and a high-tech plane became a missile. When something went wrong, it was over in a second. Often, a pilot’s body ended up burned beyond recognition in a heap of twisted, smoking metal. According to the navy, if a fighter pilot flew for 20 years, he stood a one in four chance of dying in a plane crash.
Sure the job would be risky. But think what you’d get in return: You’d ride the world’s most powerful rockets into space. You’d see Earth the way only a handful of people in history have ever seen it. Maybe you’d even walk on the moon. The rewards had to be worth the risk.
When Lovell got a call from NASA in September 1962, he didn’t hesitate. Would he become part of the second group of astronauts—the New Nine, as the newspapers would call them? Yes, he would.
He called Marilyn and told her they were moving to Houston. By that time, the Atlas had done its job. John Glenn, one of the original seven astronauts, had climbed into the tin can they called a space capsule and become the first American to circle the Earth. The Soviets had already put several Sputniks, seven dogs, dozens of mice, and two human beings into orbit. But the American space program was underway, and the Lovells were going to be a part of it.
Copyright © 2016 by Tod Olson
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First edition, November 2016
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e-ISBN 978-0-545-92812-0
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