Lost in Outer Space

by Tod Olson

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  FIRE IN THE SPACECRAFT!

  Barbara Lovell was just eight years old when her father became an astronaut. But she already knew that he risked his life for a living. Nobody in the family talked about it, but she understood. They had been living on the Pax River base, where her dad tested fighter jets for the navy. Once a month, sometimes more often, sirens sounded at the base, signaling that a plane had gone down. The men all got out their dress uniforms and went off to a funeral. Someone’s father had died.

  When they moved to Houston, though, Barbara learned that being part of an astronaut family came with plenty of benefits. The Lovells built a big brick house on Lazywood Lane in a development called Timber Cove. Nearly everyone there had something to do with NASA. Engineers drew spacecraft designs on cocktail napkins at parties. Barbara swam in the community pool, which was shaped like a space capsule. She rode in a Corvette leased to her dad for next to nothing by a local car dealer. And when he flew a mission, the gifts poured in. It was random stuff sometimes, like a typewriter that typed cursive. Mostly they got free jewelry and clothes. Fashion companies even sent her mom dresses; all she had to do was wear them when she went out to meet the reporters.

  Jim Lovell flew into orbit for the first time in 1965, when Barbara was twelve. He went up again a year later. Both flights were part of the Gemini program, NASA’s next step on the way to the ultimate goal—putting a human being on the moon. Each time her dad flew, Barbara got to bring a note to school: Please excuse Barbara; she’s going to Florida to watch her father get blasted into space. The family would stay in a hotel and hang out on the beach or at the hotel pool. Then they’d gather to watch the liftoff, and it would dawn on her what was about to happen.

  They stood on a hill overlooking the launch site. Down below was the rocket, standing tall with gaseous oxygen streaming off it like steam—all that power packed into a cylinder, and her father sat on top of it. That’s when the sinking feeling set in—the butterflies in your stomach—waiting for something to happen. And when the engines finally lit and the fire swept the launch pad, it made the ground shake all the way up the hill, and you felt it through your whole body. “I was nervous,” she told the nosy reporters once when they asked what it felt like. “I thought that the Earth was going to crack or something.”

  For a while, everything was fine with the flights—not just her dad’s but all of them. There were no sirens, no “Breaking News” announcements on TV. Barbara’s father spent two weeks in space on his first mission, longer than anyone before him.

  But one night in February 1966, her mother got a call from a friend at NASA. Two astronauts, Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, had just crashed and burned in their T-38 trainer jet. NASA was sending someone to tell Mr. See’s wife what had happened. In the meantime, they wanted Barbara’s mother to go down the street and keep Mrs. See company—without announcing that her husband had just died. The Sees had two daughters who were nine and ten, only a couple of years younger than Barbara. When they found out, one of them asked her mother, “Are we still an astronaut family?”

  Barbara (far right) watches the Apollo 8 liftoff in 1968 with Susan, Jeffrey, and their mother.

  That haunted Barbara, the thought of those kids being left without their dad.

  But it wasn’t as bad as when Eddie White’s father burned to death inside his space capsule.

  On January 27, 1967, Barbara was at home in Houston. Her father was in Washington, D.C., at a White House dinner, shaking hands with important people.

  At Cape Kennedy in Florida, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee climbed into the first Apollo command module for a test run of the liftoff procedures. The Apollo program followed Gemini, and if everything went according to plan, its missions would finally reach the moon. Its first capsule had twice been blasted into space empty, and everything had gone well. A month from now, Grissom, White, and Chaffee were going to fly the first mission with a crew aboard.

  Despite the two successful launches without a crew, the astronauts weren’t happy with the ship. It had logged about 20,000 different failures in testing. An important nozzle had shattered when the engine was fired. The heat shield cracked during a simulated landing in a pool. Wally Schirra, a backup pilot for the mission, told Grissom the day before the test run that the ship didn’t “ring right.”

  “If you have any problem,” Schirra said, “I’d get out.”

  Chaffee, White, and Grissom train in a model of the command module just a week before the test launch.

  There were plenty of problems during the test, right from the start. The oxygen filling the astronauts’ masks smelled like sour milk. The audio link from the capsule to the test controllers sounded terrible.

  “How are we going to get to the moon if we can’t talk between two or three buildings,” Grissom growled into his headset.

  At 6:20 p.m., the controllers put the countdown on hold while they tried to fix the audio. Eleven minutes later, they saw a figure move urgently inside the window of the capsule. A voice came crackling through the bad audio link: “Fire in the spacecraft!”

  Technicians on the tower rushed across a gangway toward the spacecraft hatch. Flames shot from a vent in the capsule. A wicked orange glow flashed behind the capsule window.

  In the control room, they heard Roger Chaffee’s voice: “We’ve got a bad fire in here. We’re burning up!”

  On the video screen, controllers saw a pair of arms reaching past the capsule window for the bolts on the hatch. The flight surgeon, who was monitoring the astronauts’ vital signs, noticed Ed White’s heart rate jump.

  A giant cloud of smoke erupted from the side of the capsule, and someone on the tower yelled, “She’s going to blow!”

  Seconds later the spacecraft gave way to the 2,500-degree fire raging inside. A seam in the vessel’s aluminum shell burst with a sharp crack, and a deadly wave of heat and smoke escaped into the sky. For the astronauts in the capsule, the fiery disaster was over just 14 seconds after it had begun. Grissom, Chaffee, and White had choked to death on the fumes of the fire.

  After news of the tragedy made it to the Lovell house, Barbara cried while she set the table for dinner. She didn’t sob; that wasn’t her way. Nor was it the way an astronaut family behaved. Generally, you didn’t talk about the danger. It was just there, like a cold draft in the house. Her mom probably thought she was protecting Barbara and the other kids, but they knew—at least Barbara did. She heard the sirens at the naval base and the somber voices on TV. She could tell when her mom was anxious. Sometimes she had dreams that her dad had died. But it wasn’t something they discussed.

  So as Barbara circled the table, laying plates and forks and knives for herself, her mother, her two brothers, and her sister, she made sure no one noticed her crying. But she couldn’t stop the tears from falling.

  When she went back to school there were counselors for kids to talk to if they needed it. Then Eddie White came back for the first time. Everyone hugged him in PE class.

  And somehow, life went on.

  When word of the fire reached Barbara’s father at the White House dinner, he and the other astronauts holed up in a hotel room, under orders from NASA to avoid the press. They had known the Apollo 1 crew well. It was a terrible way to die, they agreed, stuck on the ground pushing buttons in a test. Everyone had to die somet
ime. Far better to go out in a ball of flames while steering your way back to your planet, or get stuck on the moon watching Earth rise blue and white over the horizon.

  A week later, Barbara’s dad traveled to Ed White’s funeral at the West Point military academy in New York. He helped carry the coffin and lay it in the ground.

  CHAPTER 3

  LIFTOFF!

  Jim Lovell got the word at 9 a.m. on April 11, 1970: Apollo 13 was a Go. That didn’t mean it was time to get excited. No one would know for sure if they were launching until the final “Go/No Go” checks at T minus 5 minutes. Until then a dozen things could still go wrong.

  Liftoff was scheduled for 2:13 p.m. Florida time. That was 1:13 p.m. Houston time—or, in military terms, 13:13. There had been a lot of talk in the press about the supposedly unlucky number assigned to the mission. The launch time was Mission Control’s way of thumbing its nose at the doubters. A silly superstition meant nothing when you had the best science in the world on your side.

  Lovell, Haise, and Swigert weren’t about to get worried over a number either. But the preflight medical exam—that was enough to put them on edge. As a rule, astronauts hated doctors. All it took was one small thing out of whack and you could be scratched from the crew, watching on a TV monitor while your friends flew to the moon. In fact, it had happened just the day before to Ken Mattingly.

  Mattingly was Apollo 13’s scheduled command module pilot. He and Lovell and Haise had been training together for months. Then, a week before launch, they had all been exposed to German measles, and the doctors couldn’t say for sure that Mattingly was immune. Swigert started training with the crew, and soon after it was announced that he would take Mattingly’s place. Lovell put up a fight for his crewmate, but Mission Control didn’t want their command module pilot coming down with a fever 240,000 miles from Earth. Mattingly flew off to Houston in a deep depression, and on the morning of April 11 it was Swigert getting ready to fly to the moon.

  Swigert sailed through the last-minute physical along with Lovell and Haise. They sat down to the traditional prelaunch breakfast of steak, eggs, toast, and jelly. The high-protein fare was supposed to ease digestion during the long hours they would spend strapped to their seats in the spacecraft waiting for liftoff. Then, with technicians bustling around them like tailors, they wrestled themselves into their 76-pound space suits. The three men waddled out of the building and climbed into a van that drove them eight miles to the launch pad. Along the way, they passed a crowd of 7,000 people, each of them lucky enough to be admitted to Cape Kennedy for the launch. Another 100,000 or so had parked their cars in an endless line along Florida’s Route 1 to watch.

  Geared Up: Fully suited and carrying oxygen tanks, Lovell, Swigert, and Haise leave for the launch pad.

  None of the spectators had been allowed within three and a half miles of the launch site. The reason loomed high over the astronauts’ heads as they approached the launch pad: the Saturn V rocket that was about to blast them into space.

  The Saturn V was a machine of giant proportions. It stood 363 feet high—taller than the Statue of Liberty. It was 200 times more powerful than the Atlas, and it weighed as much as fifty jumbo jets when fully loaded with rocket fuel. NASA had been forced to design new vehicles just to transport it. They built a 400-foot-tall tower to hold it up. It carried enough high-explosive fuel to blow up a small city—and vaporize anyone who strayed too close at liftoff.

  As Lovell rode the metal-cage elevator up the tower, he could see gaseous oxygen spewing out of the rocket’s cone. It looked almost alive to him, a breathing beast with powers like nothing else on Earth. At around 320 feet, just before they reached the capsule, it suddenly sank in: They were about to send him to the moon.

  The Beast: Cranes hoist the first stage of a Saturn V rocket for final assembly.

  The crew crossed an access arm to the so-called “white room,” a small, enclosed space that encompassed the hatchway to the command module. At 11:32 a.m., Captain Lovell grabbed a bar above the hatch and lumbered feet first into the spacecraft. Haise and Swigert followed. They settled into their seats, shoulder to shoulder in the base of the cone.

  The basic design of the capsule, 13 feet in diameter and 11 feet high, hadn’t changed since Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee burned to death in it three years earlier. But Lovell and his crewmates had put the fire behind them. As they climbed into their own command module, they didn’t think about all the reasons they might never climb out. After all, NASA had discovered the cause of the fire and fixed the problem. The ship that would take them to the moon had no exposed wiring in the capsule. It had a less-flammable mixture of oxygen and nitrogen in the air. Its hatch would open in seconds in an emergency.

  That was pretty much enough for these men. “I think every pilot has known fear,” Lovell once told a TV reporter. “But we have confidence in the equipment we’re using, and that overcomes any fear we have of using it.”

  Besides, the equipment they were using had performed flawlessly since the fire; it had taken six Apollo crews into space. One of those flights—Apollo 8—had made Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders the first human beings to leave Earth’s gravity and orbit the moon.

  That had been the high point of Lovell’s career—even his life. To look down on the desolate, meteor-scarred landscape of the moon. To see Earth as a whole planet, no bigger than his thumbnail. To watch it rise over the horizon of the moon.

  The only thing left for Lovell was to fly down to that desert landscape and walk on the moon. Only four human beings—in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12—had done it. And now it looked like he would get his chance, too.

  Three and a half miles away, Barbara Lovell stood looking down at the launch site from the hill reserved for the families of astronauts and other VIPs. Until the day before, she had been at home with Susan and Jeffrey. Jay was away at a military boarding school in Wisconsin. Her mom had gone to Florida to be near her father during the final days of training and had left the kids with a family friend.

  This was what it meant to be an astronaut family. Barbara was used to it by now. Her father wasn’t around much. He spent a lot of time training at the launch site in Florida or visiting far-flung parts of the country where pieces of the spacecraft were made. Her mother had obligations, too; there were political events and important dinners to attend. After a while, it was almost funny: When people called for her dad, she wasn’t sure whether to say he was at NASA in Houston, at Cape Kennedy in Florida, or in outer space.

  There were times when it felt like her dad’s job took over the family. But Barbara had her own life, too. Mostly, she had her best friend, Connie Keck, whose house was a refuge when all the astronaut commotion became overwhelming. During her dad’s flights, the Lovell house overflowed with NASA people coming and going, watching TV, drinking, keeping her mother company. She would escape to Connie’s, where it was quiet and both parents were usually home. Connie’s mom and dad drove Barbara to camp when her own parents were busy. They hosted Barbara’s thirteenth birthday party just before her dad’s second Gemini mission.

  This time, her mom was supposed to come home and watch the launch from Houston. But Marilyn Lovell decided she didn’t want to leave until Apollo 13 was safely in orbit. She called home. Barbara brought the familiar note to school. Then she made the trip to Florida with Susan and Jeffrey.

  By noon on Saturday, April 11, she was watching from the hill, with the rocket breathing gas down below. This is what it was all for—the weeks with an absent dad and a distracted mom, the crazy mob of reporters, the house full of people. This is why they did it. Her father took all those trips—Houston to St. Louis to Hawaii to Florida—so he could sit on top of a steaming beast of a rocket and take the ultimate trip, off the face of the Earth.

  For two hours after they strapped into the capsule, Lovell, Haise, and Swigert followed instructions from Mission Control in Houston, where an army of engineers kept a close watch on every system in the ship.
Like doctors monitoring a patient, they could tell a thousand things at a glance: fuel pressure in the rocket, electrical power in the batteries, temperature in the command module—even Jim Lovell’s heart rate. For now, the astronauts were little more than robots. They set one switch after another, just as they had done dozens of times in training.

  Underneath them, the Saturn V had been filling with fuel since 4 a.m.—more than 800,000 gallons of liquid oxygen, hydrogen, and kerosene. Lovell, Haise, and Swigert now sat on an explosive device as powerful as an atomic bomb. If something went wrong, they had two options. Assuming there was time, they could climb out, scramble into a gondola, and zip down a wire into a fireproof concrete bunker. Or, there was the last-ditch plan: Pull a handle to fire the escape rocket attached to the nose of the command module. Hopefully, it would blast them high enough to deploy parachutes that would bring them gently back to Earth.

  As they went through all the checks, Lovell kept looking at the escape handle to make sure he knew how to use it.

  By T minus 5 minutes, the Go/No Go checks were in full swing. Each engineer scanned the data from his system and made the call: safe to launch or not. Green lights began to shine on the big launch board in Houston. The spacecraft was Go. The emergency detection system: Go.

  At T minus 3 minutes all systems shifted to automatic and the real countdown began.

  At T minus 45 seconds, Lovell flipped a final switch to set the ship’s central computer, known in NASA’s private language of acronyms as the CMC. Launch control called out the final numbers: eight … seven … six … ignition. Three hundred feet below the astronauts, a set of valves opened. Vast amounts of fuel poured into five giant engines. Great tongues of flame began to leap from the nozzles. Smoke and fire billowed out across the tarmac, 15 tons of fuel burning every second.

  Three … two … one … zero.