Lost in Outer Space

by Tod Olson

  Glynn Lunney works the flight director’s console while a group of controllers gathers around him.

  “Look, I’m worried about shutting this thing down so that it’s safe when we want to repower from the reentry batteries,” Lunney said into the loop.

  He asked his controllers if they could keep the heaters on in the guidance system—essentially the spacecraft’s GPS. Without the guidance system, there would be no way to navigate their way back into Earth’s atmosphere.

  “How many amps do they take?” he asked.

  “Ten.”

  “Oh, ten amps?!” The answer hit Lunney hard. “I’m lookin’ at 80 hours!”

  Lunney did some quick calculations. Just leaving that heater on would kill the reentry batteries in 12 hours. Without the big fuel cells in the service module, the command module was crippled. They had no choice but to power all the way down. They would have to roll the dice and take their chances.

  In the spacecraft, it was obvious the command module was dying fast. Oxygen tank 1 read about 100 psi, barely enough pressure left to push the gas into the fuel cell—much less into the air that Lovell, Haise, and Swigert had to breathe. Lovell knew exactly what Lunney knew: They would have to fire up the command module’s reentry batteries again. But every bit of power they used now meant that much less left to get them back into Earth’s atmosphere when the time came.

  If the time came.

  That thought had crossed Lovell’s mind when he first saw the gas from his ship venting into space. But right now, who had time to worry about whether they were going to live or die? And what good would it do them anyway? Anyone who wasted time wondering whether he’d still be alive tomorrow was not working the problem.

  Haise got out his binder full of procedures and started scrawling instructions from Lousma: “LEM power switch, reset and release. In the LEM, on panel 11 and panel 16, translunar bus tie. Both circuit breakers close …” It went on like that for more than a minute. Haise read the instructions back carefully and then started throwing switches.

  The LEM began to spring to life: cabin lights, lamps on the instrument panel, the low hum of machinery. Lovell and Haise floated through the tunnel and got to work. Swigert stayed in the command module, using precious power from one of their reentry batteries to keep his part of the ship running while they got the LEM powered up.

  What followed was a crazy flurry of commands from the ground and responses from space. Normally, space flight was so structured, a perfect symphony with every movement planned and timed and conducted with precision from the ground. Right now, it was all improvisation. Houston invented new procedures in hurried conversations. Orders flashed across 210,000 miles of space. The crew scrawled notes in the margins of their binders or crossed out steps on preset lists of procedures. They moved as fast as they dared, the command module sucking power from the reentry batteries with every passing second. At one point, Lousma told Swigert to power down the thrusters on the command module before the thrusters on the LEM were up. For a few minutes the entire spacecraft drifted in space without a computer or pilot in control.

  Finally, as they approached midnight Houston time, the LEM was up and ready to go. Nearly three hours had passed since the accident. They had run through a quarter of the power from the reentry batteries, but that concern was now at the bottom of the list.

  Lifeboat: The LEM had about as much space inside as a minivan.

  Standing shoulder to shoulder in the LEM, Lovell and Haise were grateful to have a home. But could it really get them back to Earth? The LEM was a great ship—for a 60-mile, 45-hour trip to the lunar surface and back. That’s what it was built for, and no more. Every extra pound on the LEM required three extra pounds of fuel, so the designers had saved weight wherever they could. The aluminum shell was no thicker than four layers of tinfoil. Rumor had it that workmen had dented it by dropping screwdrivers on the floor. The flimsy thing didn’t even have seats. And worse, it was only stocked with oxygen, electricity, and water to support two astronauts for two days. On the current flight plan, it would take four days to get three men back to Earth.

  The third of those men—Jack Swigert—was still in his darkened command module. At 11:50 p.m. Houston time, he finished powering down. He closed the valves on fuel cell 2, which had finally died along with the last oxygen tank.

  “Odyssey is completely powered down, according to the procedure that you read to Jack,” Lovell announced to Houston.

  “Roger, we copy,” said Lousma. “That’s where we want to be, Jim.”

  Swigert turned the lights out and lingered for a while. This was his vehicle. He had spent hundreds of hours in its grounded twin at NASA, simulating what it would be like in space. Now here he was, 212,000 miles up, and his ship felt like a tomb. Without heat from the instruments, the temperature had dropped into the 50s. There were no lights and no machinery humming. He was a pilot without a ship, and he felt useless. He floated through the tunnel into the LEM, looked at Lovell and Haise, and said, “It’s up to you now.”

  Barbara Lovell had no idea what was happening in Apollo 13 when her mother appeared in her bedroom late Monday night. She had shut out the commotion downstairs—all the talking and the dreaded “Breaking News” on TV. But this time she didn’t pretend to be asleep.

  Her mother sounded calm enough when she spoke. “There’s been an accident,” she said. “They’re bringing them home, but your dad’s not walking on the moon.”

  Not walking on the moon. Barbara knew what a blow that would be for her father. All the weeks of training in Florida, the weeks visiting the spacecraft plants, the weeks of her childhood missed—it was all going to come to nothing. But at least he was coming home; her mother sounded confident of that. And that was enough for Barbara. She drifted off to sleep, a closed door, a landing, and a stairwell between her and the mounting stress downstairs.

  If she had ventured beyond the landing, sleep might not have come so easily. Neighbors from the NASA community had been pouring in the door. Ashtrays and half-drunk cups of coffee littered the living room. By 11 p.m., all the TV stations were reporting the crisis.

  “The Apollo 13 spacecraft has suffered a major electrical failure,” announced ABC’s Jules Bergman.

  The astronaut families knew they could trust Bergman to get all the technical details right. But there was something harsh and gloomy about the way he delivered the news.

  “Apollo 13 is apparently also losing breathing oxygen and the astronauts may have to use the LEM’s oxygen supply,” he continued. “The emergency has ruled out any chance of a lunar landing and could endanger the lives of the astronauts themselves.”

  Walter Cronkite, on CBS, was usually calm and comforting, but even he sounded grim. Around midnight, he declared, “This is indeed the gravest emergency probably yet in the American space program.”

  Walter Cronkite reports on an earlier Apollo mission on CBS.

  On her visit upstairs, Barbara’s mother had done what parents do—what she’d been doing for eight years as a navy pilot’s spouse and eight more as an astronaut’s spouse. She tried to make her kids feel like their world was safe, like it was just another day at the office, and Dad would be home soon.

  Her job done, Marilyn Lovell went back downstairs, stared at the TV, and occasionally tried to talk to friends. When she couldn’t stand it anymore she went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. Then she kneeled on the floor and prayed.

  CHAPTER 8

  FREE RETURN

  At Mission Control, Glynn Lunney had no time for prayer. But as he watched the systems go down in the command module, he had a moment of darkness deeper than any he’d felt before. He’d been watching over space flights for ten years, as a controller and a flight director. Never had he felt like this—the solid ground yanked from under his feet and his stomach dropping into the dark hole below. Holy s___, he thought to himself, this is really happening. He had three astronauts drifting in space, and the one vehicle that co
uld get them back into Earth’s atmosphere was as dead as a toy with no batteries.

  The stress had been leaking into his voice since he took over from Kranz; if his controllers wavered for a second on the loop, he snapped at them. But stress was one thing, and despair was another. To work a problem, you had to believe there was a solution.

  Fall back on your training and work the problem.

  He could feel himself climbing out of that hole and back to his work. In the Trench below, the controllers were glued to their screens or deep in conversation on their headsets. No one seemed to have noticed his moment in hell.

  Lunney pulled himself together and turned to the next task: getting the spacecraft on a course for home.

  How exactly were they going to get a crippled spacecraft back to Earth from 215,000 miles away? In the early hours of Tuesday morning, that decision rested in Gene Kranz’s lap. Since Kranz handed over the headset to Lunney, he’d been consulting with the controllers and the other flight directors. In between discussions, he paced the floor with sweaty palms. That’s how he knew the stress was building. Mentally, he stayed calm and direct and focused, but his body betrayed him. His controllers all joked about it: You knew things were getting tense when Kranz leaned on a desk full of papers and left a handprint behind.

  Sweaty palms or no, with the astronauts settled in the LEM, it was time to make a final call on the path home. There were two options, and neither was good. Kranz could call for a direct abort, in which they would use the giant engine in the service module to turn on a dime and rocket the spacecraft back to Earth. That had the advantage of getting the astronauts back fast—in about 34 hours. The other choice was to follow a “free return” course, in which the crew would fly around the moon and use its gravity to slingshot them back to Earth. On their current schedule, that would take nearly 100 hours.

  Before the White Team went off duty, Kranz had some of his controllers begging him to turn the spacecraft around immediately. At current usage levels, it looked like the LEM would run out of power in less than 70 hours. More critically, water would be gone in about a day and a half. And without water, they had no way to cool the instruments. The guidance system would overheat like a stalled car in the desert.

  It was hard to resist turning the crew around and getting them home as fast as possible. But the risks were huge. The moon’s gravity was growing stronger by the minute. It would take a massive engine burn to bring a 100,000-pound spacecraft from 2,000 miles an hour to a dead stop, and then send it in the opposite direction. The only engine powerful enough to do it was located in the service module, not far from the oxygen tanks. One of those tanks may well have exploded into tiny bits of metal three hours ago. There was no way to tell if that engine was still intact. If they tried the direct abort and the engine quit early, they could slow Apollo 13 just enough for the moon’s gravity to suck it in and send it plummeting to the lunar surface.

  Before he had even left the console, Kranz had made up his mind. He turned to Lunney and said, “Our only real option is to go around the moon.”

  Now he gave the final okay for free return. They would just have to stretch two days’ worth of power, oxygen, and water into four. Kranz headed downstairs where he had sent his White Team to work the problem. Each of his controllers would be asking for power—power to keep the guidance system running, power to get the command module back up, power to keep the crew alive. They were like castaways on a desert island clamoring for shares of a dwindling food supply. He needed someone to listen to them all and ration power. Someone to decide what was essential and what was not. Someone who knew the spacecraft inside and out. Someone who could make the impossible possible.

  Kranz and his team decided that a direct abort was too risky. They chose the longer option—a free-return course around the moon and back to Earth. With a blast from the engine to speed up the spacecraft as it leaves lunar orbit, they hoped they could get Apollo 13 back in 143 hours.

  John Aaron was in Room 210 with the White Team controllers when Kranz walked in. Aaron was a twenty-seven-year-old EECOM with a well-earned reputation as an engineering genius. Where other people saw a jumble of unrelated numbers, he saw patterns. And where there were patterns, there were answers—clues that helped him diagnose problems long before anyone else knew what was happening.

  John Aaron (standing, in dark suit) started working at Mission Control during the Gemini missions, when he was just twenty-one years old.

  A little after 9 p.m. that night, Aaron had been home getting ready to go in to NASA for his shift. He was shaving when his boss called and told him they thought they were having an instrumentation problem on the spacecraft. Aaron had asked him to go around to the consoles and read him numbers from all the systems. He knew before he got off the phone—there was no way it was just the gauges.

  “I’ll be right in,” he said, “but in the meantime, you tell the guys that that’s not an instrumentation failure. There’s something really going on there.”

  Aaron got dressed, jumped in the car, and rushed to NASA. He was the extra “brain power” Kranz had been hoping for to back up Liebergot in the first hour of the crisis.

  Now he had joined the White Team in 210, a big, ugly cavern of a room with no windows and a few gray tables scattered around. The smell of stale coffee and tobacco smoke clouded the air. Men sat on the floor and on tables, staring at orange printouts full of numbers. Some were trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the mission; others were deep into the task of saving it.

  When Kranz walked in, he got everyone’s attention.

  “Okay, team, we have a hell of a problem,” he said. “We are on the long return around the moon and it is our job to figure out how to get them home. From now on, the White Team is off-line.”

  They were the behind-the-scenes brain trust—the people who would figure out the procedures and feed them to the controllers on duty in the mission room. They had three problems to solve: 1) how to get the astronauts home as quickly as possible with only the LEM to navigate and propel the ship; 2) how to stretch the LEM’s resources twice as far as they were meant to go; 3) how to start up the command module cold and use it for the final leg back to Earth.

  Aaron knew the resources in the spacecraft as well as anyone, and he had one thought as he listened to Kranz speak: It just wasn’t possible. Right about then, he heard Kranz call his name.

  “John Aaron will be in charge of the spacecraft resources,” Kranz announced. “Whatever he says goes. He has absolute veto authority over any use of our consumables.”

  And just like that, Aaron was thrown into the most important work he’d ever done. He was the power broker—the guy who would decide what could be used on the spacecraft and what couldn’t, what they would shut down and what they would keep running. It wasn’t that long since Aaron had been a teenager, fixing tractors on his parents’ farm in Oklahoma. Now it was his job to keep a crippled spacecraft running so that three men didn’t die in outer space.

  Aaron decided he would have to think differently. If it looked impossible from where he sat, he would just have to enter the problem from the other end. He would assume it was possible and ask, what do you have to do to make it so?

  “Okay, listen up.” Kranz was finishing his pep talk. “When you leave this room, you must leave believing that this crew is coming home. I don’t give a damn about the odds and I don’t give a damn that we’ve never done anything like this before. Flight control will never lose an American in space.”

  Jim Lovell had no intention of being lost in outer space. But right now, that’s the way his spacecraft was headed, 30,000 miles from the moon and closing in fast. He stood in the LEM, pistol-grip controllers in hand, trying to convince himself he could pilot his way onto a new path—one that pointed in the opposite direction.

  The problem was this: On previous Apollo flights, the astronauts started on a free-return trajectory. “Free” and “return”; those were comforting words. If anything w
ent wrong, all the crew had to do was stay on course. The moon’s gravity would do the work for them. It would bend their course in a broad arc, a hundred-some-odd miles from the lunar surface, whip them around the moon, and send them straight back to Earth.

  As luck would have it, Apollo 13 had a different landing site than the two previous moon shots. To bring the spacecraft in close to the site, Mission Control had plotted a different course. If the astronauts did nothing to redirect themselves, they would miss the Earth by thousands of miles on the way back. Lovell, Haise, and Swigert would end up in permanent orbit with the Earth on one end and the moon on the other.

  Anything but that.

  When Lovell first trained as an astronaut, he had spent hours gazing at the moon. Just getting there, he thought, would be so overwhelming that you wouldn’t worry about coming back. Now all he wanted to do was get the spacecraft pointed toward Earth, even if they never made it back to the surface. Burning up in the atmosphere would be better than getting stuck in space forever.

  Plotting courses in space was a job for math geniuses. They balanced the speed of the spacecraft against the force of gravity. Approach the moon too slow and gravity fights your forward motion and pulls you in. Approach too fast and you soar around the moon until gravity loses its grasp and sends you hurtling off into space. Get it exactly right and you nestle into a perfect orbit or settle onto a course headed straight for home.

  The calculations were so complex they were impossible for the average person to imagine. But the geniuses had it worked out. Under normal circumstances, Lovell wouldn’t have to work that hard to get Apollo 13 back on a free-return course. He and Haise and Swigert would listen to the engineers in Houston and punch a set of coordinates into the computer. The thrusters would automatically position the spacecraft in the right orientation, or “attitude,” in space. Once the ship was aligned the right way, they would punch another set of numbers into the computer and push a button. The engine would fire for exactly the right amount of time, and just like that, they’d be on a course for home.