Lost in Outer Space

by Tod Olson

  Lovell could hear the rumbling below him. He felt a jolt beneath his back.

  “Liftoff!” came the voice from the Launch Control Center.

  “The clock is running,” Lovell responded.

  From outside it was a fearsome sight—a missile the height of a 35-story building rising on a column of fire.

  Liftoff: Apollo 13 clears the tower on its way into Earth orbit.

  In the cockpit, it was simply loud. With 7 million pounds of thrust exploding through the engines below, the noise was deafening. Lovell had to tell Houston to speak up so his crew could hear.

  As the rocket strained to lift more than 6 million pounds of fuel and spacecraft, Lovell felt his body pressed into his seat. He called out the increase in gravitational force as the rocket picked up speed, slicing through the atmosphere. Two and a half minutes after liftoff, they hit four Gs—four times the force of gravity on Earth. They had all been through it in the simulator, but rarely had they experienced it in flight: Your arms feel like tree trunks and your chest flattens; it takes effort to force air into your lungs.

  One of the five engines on the rocket’s first stage shut down two minutes early—a little worrisome, but no one in Houston seemed too concerned. And then, 30 miles high and right on target, the rest of the Stage I engines shut down. Lovell, Haise, and Swigert shot forward as the force suddenly dropped to half a G. Haise felt like he was going to be blasted through the instrument panel.

  The Saturn V responsible for the roller coaster ride was actually three rockets in one. Each section, or stage, was meant to serve a particular purpose. When it finished its job, it would separate from the spacecraft to lighten the load and let the next stage take over. Now, 2 minutes and 44 seconds into the flight, Stage I was done. A set of exploding bolts fired 190 feet below the crew, and a cylinder the size of a 14-story building went spinning through the air, headed eventually for a meeting with the Atlantic Ocean. From the ground it looked like an invisible knife had sliced the spacecraft in half, one section still alive and the other dying behind it.

  Separation: Apollo 11, on the way to the moon nine months earlier, leaves the first stage of its Saturn V rocket behind.

  As gravity returned to normal, Swigert and Haise started to relax. They were traveling to space for the first time. Only four dozen people out of three and a half billion had seen what they were seeing right now. Swigert caught a glimpse of the cylinder, still smoking as it tumbled toward Earth.

  “Beautiful,” he breathed.

  “Look at that,” Haise said with awe in his voice.

  Lovell, who had been here three times before, was all business.

  “Mode II,” he called out, signaling the switch to the Stage II engines.

  “Look at the horizon out there,” Haise said.

  Outside the window was an awesome sight. From the ground you had to take it for granted that the Earth was round. Now, 50 miles high and climbing, Haise could actually see the curve in the globe. The endless hours he’d spent in a simulator, the tests, the pictures, and the studying—none of it had really prepared him for this.

  “13, Houston,” came the CAPCOM’s voice, flat and reassuring. “Guidance is good, and the CMC is GO.”

  They were on their way to Earth orbit—first stop on the way to the moon.

  CHAPTER 4

  ZERO G

  Thirteen minutes into the flight, Apollo 13 settled into orbit around the Earth.

  “Everything is looking good,” the CAPCOM reported.

  “Roger, Houston,” Lovell said. “And it looks good to be up here again.”

  The engine failure on the first stage had the crew worried on their way into orbit. After it quit early, they had to burn the second stage for longer than expected to make up for it. But the engineers in Houston insisted they had plenty of fuel left to get the spacecraft to the moon. Lovell figured that every mission had its glitch—one thing that doesn’t go according to plan. Hopefully, they had gotten theirs out of the way, and now they were home free.

  The astronauts unstrapped from their seats, and Haise and Swigert got their first taste of real zero gravity.

  “Jack, be careful in your movements,” Lovell warned, the veteran watching out for the rookie.

  Lovell had spent more than 500 hours floating in space. Haise and Swigert had only their training time underwater in SCUBA gear—plus a few flights in the “Vomit Comet.” That’s what they called the KC-135 jet plane that NASA used to simulate zero gravity. The trainees sat in the cargo hold, unstrapped but hooked to a nest of medical sensors. The plane rocketed skyward, accelerating all the way. When it hit about 40,000 feet and 500 miles per hour, with 2Gs of force pushing the astronauts into the floor, the pilot cut the engine and started to nose over in a wide arc. The G forces vanished, and there they were, floating in the back of the plane. They’d practice flipping switches on a control panel just like the one in the spacecraft. All the while the sensors recorded their pulse and their blood pressure and whatever else the doctors wanted to know.

  It was a wild ride, but it was over before it started. The entire experience lasted 30 seconds if the pilot was good. That was the best they could do down on Earth, where the laws of nature held you fast to the planet. With a little flying skill—and a lot of jet fuel—you could cheat gravity for a fleeting moment. But you couldn’t escape it.

  Now they’d truly broken free, and what a feeling it was. Bill Anders, who had flown to the moon with Lovell in Apollo 8, said that zero G turned you into a big jellyfish—and tests had shown that was about right. Before the Mercury flights the scientists had strapped a test subject to a beach chair and floated him in a tank of warm water for a week. When they hauled him out his muscles had gone soft, his blood pressure had dropped, and his bones already showed signs of deterioration.

  Astronauts from the Mercury program train for zero G in the cargo hold of a “Vomit Comet.”

  But for Lovell, Haise, and Swigert, there wasn’t time to float around like jellyfish. There were helmets to stow, cameras to set up, systems to check—and none of it was easy in zero G. Your head felt like an over-full water balloon because the blood that normally got pulled toward your feet by gravity stayed in your brain. You also had to think ahead just to move around. Push off from one side of the capsule a little too hard and you bounced off the other side like a Ping-Pong ball with nothing to slow you down. It could be fun, but too much of it and you began to understand how the KC-135 got its nickname.

  One day into the flight, Haise washed down a few bacon cubes with some juice and promptly threw it all up. There were bags designed for exactly this purpose, and he managed to grab one in time. It was a happy moment in the small, poorly ventilated spacecraft. Stray liquid in zero G tended to float in large, stinking globules until it could be captured on a rag.

  Aside from a little queasiness, the start of the mission couldn’t have gone more smoothly. At 2 hours 35 minutes in, it was time to leave the Earth behind. Swigert fired the last stage of the Saturn rocket. The spacecraft accelerated toward 25,000 miles an hour, straining against the gravity that held it in orbit. In five minutes, the third stage had done its job. It pushed Apollo 13 out of orbit and propelled it toward the moon at a speed almost impossible to imagine by earthbound standards: from Boston to Washington, D.C., in a minute; from start to finish in a 10K race in less than a second.

  The moon would require a more leisurely three-day trip. It was, after all, 240,000 miles away.

  Inside the spacecraft, the crew barely felt like they were moving at all. Out the windows there were no trees or fences or telephone poles flying past—just the blackness of space. Lovell, Haise, and Swigert had only two signs that they were leaving their planet in the dust. For one thing, radio communication came with a delay now. More impressively, the Earth was transforming slowly from a vast carpet of land and water below them into a distinct blue-and-white orb glowing in the sky. Four hours into the flight and 10,000 miles out, they could see the entire globe
. After seven hours, Haise snapped a series of pictures. The Earth was half illuminated, half in shadow. They’d seen the moon like that hundreds of times, but never their own planet. From down there, the Earth was the whole world, no question about it. From up here, it looked vibrant and alive, bigger and brighter than anything else. But it was only one world out of many.

  Until they reached lunar orbit, the crew would be busy with housekeeping duties. Haise, as pilot of the lunar module, wouldn’t have much to do until they powered up his part of the ship at around 55 hours. Two days later—according to the flight plan—he would detach the LEM from the rest of the spacecraft and help Lovell pilot it 60 miles down to the surface of the moon.

  Earth from Apollo 13, 35,000 miles away.

  Swigert, the command module pilot, would stay in lunar orbit in the CSM—the combined command and service module—until Lovell and Haise finished their stay on the moon. When the LEM blasted back into orbit, Swigert would manuever the CSM to dock with it. After Lovell and Haise climbed back aboard, they would jettison the LEM, letting it drift alone in lunar orbit until it eventually crashed into the moon. Swigert would then help Lovell pilot the rest of the ship home.

  Just before they entered Earth orbit, they would jettison the service module, leaving the crew with nothing but the tiny cone of the command module. In it they would enter Earth’s atmosphere for the first time in eight days, and three big, billowing parachutes would lower them to an easy splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.

  That was their whole mission in a nutshell. It sounded simple when you laid it out like that—if you didn’t mention the hundreds of engineers doing brilliant work for a decade, the thousands of intensely precise mathematical calculations, or the billions of dollars in state-of-the-art equipment needed to get them to the moon and back.

  The astronauts controlled that equipment from the console in front of Swigert’s seat. There were nine panels with more than 250 gauges monitoring everything from cabin pressure to oxygen levels to electrical power supply. The crew also had 500 buttons, knobs, switches, and dials at their fingertips. Most of the controls were protected by U-shaped metal brackets to make sure a stray hand or elbow didn’t reboot the computer or depressurize the spacecraft.

  It looked complicated, and it was. But piloting a spacecraft didn’t take the kind of hands-on, split-second decision making that it took to pilot a jet plane. In Apollo 13, Lovell, Haise, and Swigert had to check their course against the position of the stars. They had to burn the main engine to make a few course corrections. They fired an array of small thrusters to control the spacecraft’s alignment in space. Aside from that they checked pressure gauges, monitored electrical readouts, and adjusted communications antennae. But mostly, the computer flew the ship.

  At around 23 hours, after their first 10-hour rest period, Lovell told Houston they’d had a “fairly good night’s sleep.”

  “Okay. Real fine,” said Joe Kerwin, the CAPCOM on duty. “About the only major thing on the spacecraft is that it’s been getting farther away.”

  Kerwin went on to report the news: The Houston Astros had won; an earthquake had hit the Philippines; the Beatles had broken up.

  Swigert admitted he had forgotten to file his income tax return, and Houston assured him they would get him an extension.

  “Jack, the preliminary indications are that you can get a 60-day extension on your income tax if you’re out of the country,” the CAPCOM said.

  “That’s good news,” said Swigert. “I guess I qualify.”

  At one point, Lovell pointed the TV camera out the window at a shower of silvery, frozen droplets glistening in the sky.

  “Think you could guess what that might be?” Haise asked, with a little mischief in his voice.

  Swigert explained that they had just executed a waste-water dump. Apollo 13 was headed for the moon, escorted by a cloud of frozen urine.

  The banter was so casual it sounded like college buddies together for a reunion. Only the bursts of static and high-pitched beeps hinted that half the party was on its way to the moon.

  That, and the fact that most of the conversation sounded like this:

  Lovell: “We’ve retrieved Jack’s dosimeter, and it’s reading 02022.”

  Kerwin: “Okay. We copy 02022 on the dosimeter, Jim.”

  Lovell: “That’s affirm.”

  Kerwin: “13, Houston. At your convenience, we’d like the LEM/CM Delta-P reading.”

  Lovell: “That reading is 0.65 psi.”

  Kerwin: “Copy 0.65. Thank you.”

  After the second rest period, more than 46 hours into the flight, Lovell reported that Haise, his lunar module pilot, or LMP, had lived up to his reputation as an expert at leisure activities: “LMP had a solid nine hours of sleep; I couldn’t wake him up this morning.”

  “Spacecraft is in real good shape as far as we’re concerned,” Kerwin reported from Houston. “We’re bored to tears down here.”

  In a few hours, Lovell and Haise would give their TV tour of the spacecraft. Barbara and her family would watch from the space center, then go home to bed. Several minutes later, boredom would be the last thing Kerwin, the engineers, or the astronauts had to worry about.

  CHAPTER 5

  WE’VE HAD A PROBLEM

  Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

  Lovell’s words came at 9:07 p.m. Houston time, clipped and matter-of-fact. The engineers in Mission Control had to read between the lines to hear the tension in his voice, but the flight surgeon did not. He sat just to the left of the CAPCOM in front of a long row of monitors, staring at the readout from the astronauts’ medical sensors. In a matter of seconds, three heart rates jumped from 70 beats per minute to more than 130.

  And this time, it wasn’t the repress valve.

  When that dull metallic bang rocked the ship nearly 56 hours into the mission, Haise was still in the tunnel, coming back from the lunar module after the TV broadcast. He could actually see a shock wave ripple through the metal walls around him. Two seconds later, the high-pitched master alarm squealed in his headset.

  Lovell heard it too, an ear-splitting sound that was enough to make anyone’s heart race. He looked at the instrument panel and saw an array of lights that should not have been on—yellow, amber, red. One of them stood out.

  “We’ve had a main bus B undervolt,” he announced abruptly.

  One of two buses in the command module—the panels that distribute electricity from the fuel cells to the equipment—looked like it had gone dead.

  “Okay, stand by, 13; we’re looking at it,” came the reply from Houston.

  Haise floated down from the tunnel and tried to make sense of the gauges on the instrumentation panel. The needle measuring oxygen levels in one of their two main tanks dipped to 20 percent for a moment. Then it bounced back up over the “full” mark. The power in main bus B came back. Then it dropped again. Maybe—just maybe—it was only the gauges that were going haywire.

  In the windowless control room in Houston, Gene Kranz’s headset was squawking. He was the flight director on duty at the time, in charge of a team of flight controllers, the safety of three astronauts, and the success of a $400 million mission. He stood on the third tier in an amphitheater-like setup, looking down on his two rows of controllers. They called it the “Trench” down there—the place where the real work gets done. Each controller was responsible for a system on board the spacecraft: guidance and navigation; flight path; reentry; communications; electricity, air, and water, and so on. They sat at computer monitors with a dizzying array of numbers scrolling past.

  Gene Kranz works the flight director’s console during a later Apollo mission.

  Right now the numbers weren’t making sense, and the controllers wanted Kranz to know about it: The computer on board the ship had shut down and restarted; the radio signal had switched antennas abruptly.

  Then Sy Liebergot’s voice came through the headset from the console just below Kranz’s: “We may have had an in
strumentation problem, Flight.”

  Liebergot was the EECOM on duty—the Electrical, Environmental, and Consumables Manager. He was in charge of pretty much everything that kept the spacecraft running and the astronauts alive. And he couldn’t believe what he was seeing on his screen. It looked like he had lost two out of Apollo 13’s three fuel cells, one of two main buses, and one of two oxygen tanks. The second oxygen tank seemed to be losing ground fast. If that much of the spaceship had failed, the crew would be dead. It had to be the gauges that were going haywire, he told himself. It had to be an instrumentation problem.

  A minute passed, then two, and Kranz’s voice came through again, edgy this time, like he was ready for some answers. “EECOM, it looks like a lot of instrumentation problems here.”

  “That’s affirm … ,” Liebergot answered.

  What else could he say? Three minutes into the problem and he hadn’t come up with anything solid. Like all the controllers, he had spent endless hours training for just this kind of thing. Hundreds of times, they had sat at their consoles with the astronauts inside a model of the spacecraft in another room. The directors programmed problems into the system, and the controllers had to react. Read the numbers. Diagnose the problem. Decide what to do. They had done it over and over again until he couldn’t imagine a situation they hadn’t prepared for. When the time came and the situation was real, you fell back on your training and you worked the problem.

  And yet, in all the hundreds of simulations, he had never seen a problem like this.

  “Well”—it was Kranz again, pressing him—“let’s get some recommendations here, Sy, if you got any better ideas.”

  On Liebergot’s left, he could hear the CAPCOM, Jack Lousma, stalling for time while the crew ran down the list of problems they saw.

  Lovell reported half the thrusters were out.

  “Roger,” said Lousma.

  “We got a main bus A undervolt now, too, showing,” said Haise.

  “Main A undervolt,” said Lousma.