by Tod Olson
Half the spacecraft seemed to be dying, and they had nothing to tell the astronauts.
Finally, Liebergot suggested the crew reset the connections between the fuel cells and the buses. Maybe the jolt in the spacecraft had jarred them loose.
“Okay, Houston,” Haise reported. “I tried to reset and fuel cell 1 and 3 are both showing zip on the flows.”
“We copy,” Lousma said. Then he switched off the air-to-ground communications loop so the astronauts couldn’t hear him.
“Are there any kind of leads we can give them?” he asked. “Are we looking at instrumentation or have we got a real problem or what?”
Gone was the easy banter that had filled the airwaves for two-and-a-half days. Now everyone needed answers, and they needed them fast. Lousma, like all CAPCOMs, was a fellow astronaut; he needed something to tell the crew. Kranz, as flight director, had final responsibility for the whole operation; he needed something to tell Lousma.
All their questions had landed in Liebergot’s lap, and he didn’t have the answers. Most problems were diagnosed in a matter of minutes; that’s how well-trained they were. But this one didn’t make sense. Too many things were going wrong at once.
For two minutes, they said nothing at all to the crew, while Kranz kept at Liebergot over the headset. He wanted to know what they had on the spacecraft that was still working fine. And he wanted to make sure that as they fumbled around for solutions they didn’t ruin what was working.
Finally, Swigert’s voice came through: “Okay, Houston. Are you still reading 13?”
“That’s affirmative,” said Lousma. “We’re trying to come up with some good ideas for you.”
In the spacecraft, Lovell had at least one idea of his own. He wanted to get the hatch to the LEM closed fast. He knew the shell of the lunar module hadn’t been breached; they’d all be dead if it had. But if the problem came from that direction, he wanted to make sure it stayed there. He and Swigert drifted up to wrestle with the hatch.
Haise sat in his seat on the right side of the capsule and tried to help Houston troubleshoot the problem. The suggestions weren’t exactly flying through his headset. Meanwhile, the readouts on the fuel cells stared at him from the instrument panel: fuel cell 1, completely dead; fuel cell 3, completely dead.
Right in front of him, hanging on the panel, was a card listing the mission rules. He didn’t even need to look. He knew they had to have three functioning fuel cells to go into lunar orbit. Haise felt his heart sink. Unless it really was just the instruments going haywire, he would not be walking on the moon.
The control panel in the command module held a dizzying array of 500 switches and 250 gauges.
What had not occurred to him yet was the thought that he might never walk on Earth again.
By this time, 14 minutes into the problem, Lovell was back in front of the instrument panel. He reminded Houston that oxygen tank 2 was reading completely empty. Then, for the first time since the bang, he glanced out the window on the left side of the cockpit. What he saw raised a deep, queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach—and it had nothing to do with zero gravity. A stream of white gas drifted ominously away from the spacecraft. He couldn’t see the source of the gas, but it had to be escaping from the service module.
“It looks to me, looking out the hatch, that we are venting something,” he reported to Houston. “We are venting something out into the—into space.”
CHAPTER 6
A DYING SHIP
Lovell’s report was still scratching through the air-ground loop when Kranz repeated the words to no one in particular.
“Crew thinks they are venting something.”
“Roger, we copy your venting,” Lousma said to the crew.
“It’s a gas of some sort,” Lovell reported.
Five seconds ticked by, then ten, while the news sunk in: Broken gauges did not vent gas into space. What they had was a real problem, not an instrumentation problem. And real problems put men—not just missions—in danger.
Finally, Kranz said, “Okay, let’s everybody think of the kind of things we’d be venting.”
“Let me look at the system, Flight, as far as the venting is concerned,” Liebergot said.
“I assume you’ve called in your backup EECOM, see if we can get more brain power in here,” Kranz said.
“We got one in here,” Liebergot replied abruptly.
Every console in the control room had handles on either side of the monitors, as though the controllers might someday need to hang on for dear life. Liebergot started using them. The room was full of people, his headset full of chatter—and he had never felt so alone in his life.
Fall back on the training and work the problem.
Liebergot’s head was full of questions: What exactly was venting? Where was it venting from? What was still good on the spacecraft, and how could they salvage it? On his desk he had a diagram of the spacecraft’s electrical system. Tanks in the service module fed hydrogen and oxygen into the fuel cells. When the two gases combined under pressure, the chemical reaction produced both electricity and water. The fuel cells then fed the electrical power into the buses, which distributed it to all the equipment on board the command module.
So far, he had reports of some kind of jolt; he had an oxygen tank reading zero; and he had some kind of gas venting into space. It didn’t take much to figure out that the gas was probably oxygen. But NASA didn’t launch a spacecraft without backup systems and then backups for the backups. They had two oxygen tanks and three fuel cells so that one could fail and the mission would barely miss a beat. Why, then, had they lost two out of three fuel cells? And why was the second oxygen tank failing too?
Liebergot had a diagram like the one above (inset) showing how oxygen and hydrogen combined in the fuel cells to produce electricity for the spacecraft.
What he did know is that they seemed to be losing the command module, and if they kept going like this, they’d soon be out of power.
“Okay EECOM, I’m comin’ back to you.” It was Kranz, looking for answers again.
“Flight,” Liebergot said, “I think the best thing we can do is start a powerdown.”
On board the spacecraft, the needle on the gauge for oxygen tank 1 was moving like the hand of a ticking clock. It didn’t drop like a gas gauge in a car, too slowly to notice. Lovell could actually see it move—the life’s blood of the command module slipping away.
There had never been much question in his mind that they had a real problem. In Houston, all they had were numbers on a screen. In the spacecraft they felt the jolt of that first bang. They heard the squeal of the master alarm. They saw the warning lights flash. Now they could see the gas escaping into the void. And if they looked closely, they could pick out tiny fragments of metal—no more than four inches long—floating along with them toward the moon. Whatever happened back there in the service module had blasted a piece of their spacecraft into bits.
The command service module looked just like this one, from Apollo 15. The crew, riding in the cone-shaped CM, couldn’t see the service module at all.
To make matters worse, the ship was lurching around in space like a balloon with a hole in it. Normally, the computerized guidance system fired the thrusters automatically to keep the ship rotating slowly like a piece of meat on a spit. That kept the sun from overcooking one side of the spaceship and freezing the other side. Now the gas escaping from the service module acted like an unauthorized thruster, pushing the ship out of alignment. The computer was firing the thrusters right and left to correct for it.
But despite all the evidence staring them in the face, Lovell, Swigert, and Haise were blind. They didn’t have the data Houston had. They didn’t have dozens of engineers examining the numbers.
Houston had all of that—and they still had no answers. Right now, they had Lovell’s crew going through a checklist, flipping switches to turn off unnecessary instruments, lights, and heaters. That was all fine; at least it would give t
hem more time with the power they had left. But it was little more than a Band-Aid over a bullet wound. It wasn’t a cure.
“Okay, 13.” It was Lousma’s voice through the air-ground loop, promising information—at some point in the future. “We’ve got lots and lots of people working on this; we’ll give you some dope as soon as we have it, and you’ll be the first one to know.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Lovell. He couldn’t keep the sarcasm from slipping into his voice.
Liebergot had no hard information. All he had was an oxygen supply that was dwindling at a rate of 2 pounds per square inch, or psi, every minute. The command module had lost more than three-quarters of its oxygen and would be dead in two hours, maybe less. Liebergot had the crew fire up the heaters in the tank to try to bring the pressure up. It was just a stab in the dark, not an answer. And when the crew switched on the heaters, the oxygen needle kept moving in the same direction: down.
Little by little, Liebergot was being pushed toward a conclusion—and a last-ditch solution. The main systems that kept the command module running—the fuel cells and the oxygen tanks—were dying. That was only too clear from the jumble of bad numbers on Liebergot’s screen. But two seats to his right sat the TELMU, the controller in charge of all the systems on the lunar module—and his screen looked fine. The LEM had its own completely independent supply of oxygen and power, designed to take Lovell and Haise on a two-day excursion to the surface of the moon. As far as anyone could tell, it had not been damaged. Maybe, if they worked it just right, the LEM could keep the astronauts alive and the spacecraft running long enough to get them back to Earth.
The LEM as lifeboat. It was an idea they had worked on in simulations before. There were plenty of reasons why it was a long shot, but at this point, it was all they had.
Liebergot clicked onto the flight director’s loop. “Flight, EECOM. The pressure in O2 tank 1 is all the way down to 297. We better think about getting in the LEM.”
Kranz pressed Liebergot to find a way to save the oxygen tank. But he knew they were running out of options.
“TELMU from Flight,” he said into his headset. “I want you to get some guys figuring out minimum power in the LEM to sustain life.”
More than 200,000 miles away, Lovell, Haise, and Swigert were coming to the same conclusion as Houston. They could feel the command module dying around them. Half the instruments were down to save power. The mechanical hum that normally filled the cabin had faded noticeably. The cabin lights were low. Without the instruments and the lights to warm the air, the temperature had dropped below 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
They could take refuge in the LEM, they knew that. They might even be able to make its life support systems last all the way back to Earth orbit. But the command module was their only ticket back to the surface of their planet. When they tried to penetrate the dense gases of Earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour, friction would engulf the ship in a 5,000-degree fireball. Only the command module had a heat shield that could keep them from roasting alive.
Houston was already thinking along the same lines. The command module had its own batteries and a small oxygen tank to get it back into the atmosphere after the crew jettisoned the service module. Right now the crew was using those batteries to shore up the failing fuel cells. The order came from Lousma to disconnect the batteries and save them for reentry.
Houston wanted to make one last-ditch effort to save the oxygen tank in the service module. It was still possible that the tank was fine, and the gas was leaking through the bad fuel cells. If they closed the reactant valves—the valves that let oxygen through to the cells—maybe the leak would stop. The only problem was, when you closed the reactant valves you couldn’t reopen them. The fuel cell was gone for good. And that meant, once and for all, that the lunar mission was over. They had known it for a while in the back of their minds, but now there was no escaping it: They’d reached the point of no return.
“Okay, 13, this is Houston,” came Lousma’s voice, crackling through the air-ground loop. “It appears to us that we’re losing O2 flow through fuel cell 3. So, we want you to close the reac valve on fuel cell 3.”
“Did I hear you right?” Haise said.
“That’s affirmative. Close the reac valve on fuel cell 3.”
Haise checked again: “Okay … do you want me to go through that whole smash for fuel cell shutdown? Is that correct?”
It was. And as Haise started flipping switches, both he and Lovell knew that they had probably lost the only chance they would ever have to walk on the moon.
But after they shut down fuel cell 3, and then fuel cell 1, Swigert looked at the oxygen gauge again. It read just over 200 psi and still dropping. The command module would go dark in less than 30 minutes.
“Does it look like it’s still going down?” Swigert asked, hoping maybe things looked better in Houston than they did in the command module.
“It’s slowly going to zero,” Lousma said, “and we’re starting to think about the LEM lifeboat.”
“Yes,” Swigert answered. “That’s what we’re thinking too.”
CHAPTER 7
LIFEBOAT
Just an hour before NASA began to give up on the Apollo 13 command module, Barbara Lovell had been watching her father show off his spacecraft on the monitors at the space center. His voice had sounded easy and relaxed—like he was out for a Sunday drive in his Corvette: Aren’t the seats comfortable? See how easy it shifts. And oh, by the way, check out the Earth outside the window.
Barbara’s mother definitely thought her dad seemed fine. When they got home, she told the family friend who had been watching Jeffrey, “They look like they’re having fun up there.”
It had taken the family 15 minutes to drive from NASA to Timber Cove. Jeffrey was asleep. A protocol officer from NASA was there, reading a magazine on the couch. Barbara could never figure out why they needed the extra attention. It was like having the Secret Service watching over you.
Barbara went upstairs and got ready for bed. Her father was going to walk on the moon, and she was happy for him. But she also knew what it meant down here on Earth: people in the house all the time, reporters to deal with, extra duties with Jeffrey. She had spent a lot of time watching her little brother while her mom went to NASA dinners and visited her dad at the Cape. It was fine, really; she loved Jeffrey. But he had called her “Mama” for the longest time after he learned to talk.
It was around 10 p.m. when Barbara heard a commotion downstairs. She went out to the landing and listened through the railing. The phone rang a few times. The TV news was on. The door opened and closed. Pete Conrad, another astronaut, and his wife were down there talking to her mother. Some other friends were there too.
Something was wrong; guests normally didn’t come over this late. Barbara couldn’t tell what it was, but she could hear the stress in people’s voices. She didn’t want to go downstairs where she’d have to ask and answer questions. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be too bad, she thought. NASA would figure it out. She went back to her room and got in bed. A short while later, a friend of her mother’s came up and whispered her name. Barbara pretended she was asleep.
At Mission Control, there was no sleep in sight for Gene Kranz’s White Team. The controllers worked in four shifts, with each team identified by a color. At 10:20 p.m., an hour and 10 minutes after the accident, the White Team shift was over. But no one was going home. Kranz handed over his headset to Glynn Lunney, flight director of the Black Team. He told his flight controllers to head downstairs to the airless conference rooms on the 2nd floor. There, they would join dozens of assistant controllers who were already working the problem. They would dig back into the second-by-second logs of all the systems and try to figure out what had gone wrong. Eight and a half minutes had passed between the end of the TV broadcast and the bang. Somewhere in the stream of numbers, there had to be a clue.
With a few dozen of the best engineering minds in the country, they’d uncove
r the cause of the problem. In the meantime, they’d figure out how to get the ship home with three healthy astronauts aboard.
Sy Liebergot pried himself loose from the handles on his console and gave up his seat to the Black Team EECOM.
Liebergot had never been so relieved in his life.
As the White Team cleared out, Lunney took over the flight director’s headset and started grilling his flight controllers. Kranz had been edgy, but also confident and reassuring. Now tension crackled through the loop. Once, twice, three, four times Lunney went around the room asking if the controllers had done everything possible to save oxygen tank 1. He checked with the EECOM to make sure it wasn’t just the gauges. He even went back to tank 2, which had been reading zero since 9 p.m. Wasn’t there something they could do to bring it back?
An hour and a half had passed since the crisis, and the flight director was still hoping the problem wasn’t real.
“Geez, it’s really going down,” he said out loud over the loop, watching the contents of tank 1 leak away.
At 10:42, they were down to 18 minutes’ worth of oxygen. That meant 18 minutes of power, 18 minutes until the command module went dark, 18 minutes to power up the LEM and get it ready to keep three men alive and somehow fly the entire spaceship back to Earth.
Now the chatter on the flight director’s loop was constant. Could they get the LEM powered up before they ran out of power in the command module? What could they shut down to give them more time? How much of the command module’s oxygen and battery power could they use and still have enough left for reentry?
Lunney could feel the stress building as they started to shut down the command module. They would have to bring it to life again to get the crew back into Earth’s atmosphere. But no one had ever tried to start up a command module in the middle of space. Suppose the instruments were too cold. Suppose the thrusters wouldn’t fire or the computer wouldn’t start. They could potentially work around the clock for days to get the crew back to Earth orbit, only to leave them stranded there forever, like a lifeless TV satellite.