Lost in Outer Space

by Tod Olson

  “Roger,” he said. “And now we want to power down as soon as possible.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “MY DAD ISN’T COMING HOME”

  By Wednesday morning, Apollo 13 was an oversized, flying refrigerator. The command module had been dead for 36 hours, warmed only by the heat that drifted in from the LEM. Now even the LEM had gone dark and frigid. After the burn, the crew had powered down to 12 amps, less than a quarter of the normal supply. The power in the LEM’s system would barely keep three 100-watt lightbulbs lit.

  The hardest part for Lovell had been to watch the guidance platform go down. Known as the PGNS, or “Pings” in NASA-speak, the Primary Guidance, Navigation and Control System was their GPS. It kept track of their position in space so they knew how to align themselves when they needed to change course. Lovell already knew they would have to make a midcourse correction before they made it home. When they did, they’d have to navigate completely by the stars—assuming they could see any.

  “I sure hate to lose the PGNS,” he had said to Houston, looking for reassurance. “I sure hope that procedure for the midcourse is a good one.”

  “It is,” said the CAPCOM.

  He failed to mention that Houston hadn’t yet decided what the procedure would be.

  At 1 a.m. Lovell decided he needed some sleep. He left the ship to Haise and Swigert and drifted into the command module—“the bedroom,” they were calling it now. He zipped himself into his feather-light sleeping bag and curled into a ball. In zero gravity, air has no movement to it, so warm air doesn’t rise. If you stay still enough, your own body heat wraps you in an insulating pocket that keeps the cold away.

  At least that was the theory. But in a command module where the temperature had fallen well below 50 degrees, body heat wasn’t enough. After an hour, Lovell was back in the LEM, where it was still a few degrees warmer.

  Jack Lousma was back on as CAPCOM, 24 hours after he finished leading the crew through the early hours of the crisis. “Gee whiz,” he said to Lovell. “You got up kind of early, didn’t you?”

  Lovell dozes in place in the lunar module after giving up on the frigid command module.

  “It’s cold back there in the command module,” said Lovell.

  The cold was only part of it, though. It was hard to sleep when so many issues remained unresolved. Houston still hadn’t told Lovell how he was going to align the ship for course correction. And he couldn’t be sure they were getting their thermal control right. The computer was rotating the ship to distribute the sun’s heat evenly. But the way they were tumbling through space, it wasn’t clear the procedure was working.

  And the final thing keeping Lovell up? There was a chance that he and Swigert and Haise would suffocate on their own breath a few hours from now.

  This was a problem Houston had been aware of for a while. With every breath the astronauts took, oxygen fed their cells to keep them alive. But just like on Earth, every time they breathed out, they filled the air with carbon dioxide, or CO2. In a house or a building, the gas escapes without endangering anyone. But in a sealed spacecraft, it wouldn’t take long for it to fill the air and poison everyone inside.

  Both the LEM and the command module had special filters to trap the CO2 and keep the air clean. But the LEM’s filters, like everything else aboard the lunar lander, were only designed to support two men for two days. Sometime in the late morning, those filters would fill with gas and lose their ability to soak up any more CO2. Every breath would begin to poison the air. If they did nothing, the crew would start to feel light-headed. They’d get short of breath and their hearts would pound. Eventually, they would lose consciousness. The spacecraft would continue on, carrying their bodies toward home.

  Everyone knew that the solution to the problem lay in the dead command module. Odyssey would be inactive for the better part of four days. It had plenty of extra CO2 filters, known as lithium hydroxide canisters. But no one had ever thought they would be needed on the LEM. As a result, they’d been built in a completely different shape and size than the LEM’s filters; they were square when they needed to be round. To keep the crew from suffocating, NASA had to figure out how to fit a square peg in a round hole.

  Thankfully, that is exactly what they had done. A team of engineers gathered in Building 7 at NASA with all the materials the crew had available on the spacecraft. When they emerged, they had an odd-looking contraption pieced together with tape, cardboard, plastic bags, and an old sock—a makeshift machine designed to save the lives of three astronauts.

  Deke Slayton, head of flight crew operations, explains the makeshift CO2 filter in Mission Control.

  By about 9:30 a.m. Houston time, Haise and Swigert had gotten a few hours’ sleep. They gathered in the LEM with Lovell and got to work while Jack Lousma read up instructions from the ground. The men dug out a roll of duct tape and a towel. Lovell found some long underwear they were supposed to wear during the lunar landing. He unwrapped them and saved the plastic bags. Haise dug out a set of spiral-bound cards with instructions for lifting off from the lunar surface. He cut off one of the cards. If they couldn’t use this stuff on the moon, it could at least help them get back to Earth.

  For the next hour, they worked like preschool kids engrossed in a craft project. Sticky side up or sticky side down? Which end is top and which is bottom? Don’t cut the hole too big; we can always make it bigger. Here they were, surrounded by the most advanced technology in the world—and they were making a filter out of an arm’s-length of tape, some carved-up cardboard, and a piece of an old towel.

  “Okay,” said Swigert when their work was done. “Our do-it-yourself lithium-hydroxide canister change is complete.”

  Swigert shows off the finished filter in the LEM.

  Two hours later, Lovell had finally gone off to sleep. Haise hooked up the finished CO2 filter and verified that it was doing its job. Then he thanked Lousma for all the work they were doing on the ground.

  “We’re just having a ball down here working on all kinds of new procedures, Fred,” Lousma said. “We expect to have your entry procedures out here by Saturday or Sunday at the very latest.”

  “Saturday or Sunday?” said a groggy Haise, not entirely sure if Lousma was joking. They were supposed to land on Friday.

  “At the very latest,” replied Lousma in deadpan voice.

  “Take your time, Jack,” said Haise.

  It wasn’t clear from the exchange just how much of a sense of humor Fred Haise had left.

  John Aaron, the “power broker” at Mission Control, knew time was in short supply. Huddled in Room 210 with his slide rule and his charts, he had to figure out how to start a freezing-cold command module in space with almost no power at all. No one had ever done it before. And the way NASA normally works, a procedure like this would take a month or two to develop, revise, and get approved. Aaron had 36 hours to get it done.

  He figured that if he cut the systems on the command module down to their bare bones, the reentry batteries would provide him with two hours’ worth of power. On the ground it took an entire day to start up the command module. Most of the controllers thought he was crazy to try it in two hours. Suppose the thrusters were frozen and wouldn’t heat up in time? Suppose the wiring was wet from condensation and it shorted out an important circuit? If anything went wrong there would be no time to fix it.

  But Aaron had no choice. He went from controller to controller, bargaining with each of them for power. The GNC in charge of the guidance systems wanted the cooling system up two and a half hours ahead of time. Aaron wanted to give it a half hour. They compromised at one and a half. The controller in charge of recovery operations in the ocean wanted a little locator beacon powered up so the ships could track the spacecraft if it landed off course. Aaron turned him down.

  “Our biggest problem is getting them to an ocean,” he said. “If we can get them there, surely you can find them.”

  Finally, on Wednesday night, Aaron stood in front o
f the controllers in Room 210 with a plan they weren’t going to like. The only way they could get the command module powered up was to do it blind. The communications network that let Mission Control monitor the systems on the spacecraft took up too much power. They would have to leave it off until Odyssey was completely powered up.

  “John, this is just asking for trouble,” someone said.

  “Doing it any other way is asking for more,” he replied.

  “But no one’s ever tried this kind of thing before. No one’s even thought of trying it.”

  “It won’t be the first thing about this flight that’s been irregular,” Aaron said.

  Someone else told him it was more than irregular; it was downright dangerous. “Suppose something starts to overheat or blow. We won’t know until it’s too late.”

  In John Aaron’s view, that was a chance they would have to take.

  Barbara Lovell wasn’t really sure what chances her father was taking. No one had sat her down and told her about frozen thrusters or damp wiring, and she hadn’t asked. But she could feel the tension building in the house.

  Her brother Jeffrey was too young to understand what was happening, and that was exactly how it should be. All he knew was that his dad wouldn’t be bringing back the moon rock he’d promised him. He got over that disappointment soon enough.

  For her younger sister, Susan, there was a lot more than moon rocks at stake. At school the day before, someone had come up to her and said, “I’m so sorry your dad isn’t coming home.” Then she came back to Lazywood Lane to find a priest in his black robes leading everyone in prayer. The scene looked way too much like a funeral service. That evening, their mother found Susan sobbing in her room. It took a lot of consoling to convince her that NASA knew exactly what they were doing. They would make sure she saw her dad again.

  On Wednesday, Barbara finally got out of the house. The reporters caught up with her at the car before she could close the door. They fired questions at her while the cameras clicked. The pictures would make it into the newspapers the next morning: “Barbara Lovell, 16, daughter of Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell, prepares to drive to school from family home.”

  Escape: Caught by reporters, Barbara tries to leave the house on Wednesday morning.

  Later that day, she made her way to her sanctuary at Connie’s house. The two friends made a run to the grocery store, but when they pulled into the parking lot, Barbara didn’t get out. All the stress of the last two days churned inside her—the hushed conversations in the family room, the breaking news broadcasts, the rasp of the squawk box. Alone with Connie, she finally felt like she could let it all out. In the parking lot, surrounded by station wagons and abandoned shopping carts, she burst into tears.

  “My dad isn’t coming home,” she sobbed. “I know I’m not going to see him again.”

  Connie, sitting three feet away, looked honestly shocked—like it was the first time she had considered that NASA, with its genius engineers, might fail to bring Barbara’s dad home.

  CHAPTER 12

  DEEP FREEZE

  If Barbara Lovell had been listening to the squawk box on Wednesday afternoon, she might have felt better. Fred Haise was alone in his lunar module while Swigert and Jim Lovell were getting some sleep. Haise was feeling good enough to turn to one of his favorite topics: food. He had barely eaten for a day after the accident. Now he was back on schedule, wrestling with a package of gingerbread cubes. To save water, the crew had stopped eating freeze-dried meals that needed to be mixed with liquid. That meant no more chicken and rice, or pork and scalloped potatoes. What they had left sounded like a set of flavored building blocks: coconut cubes and chocolate cubes and cheese cracker cubes and peanut cubes and apricot cereal cubes. And they weren’t always easy to manage.

  Haise radioed a new, pressing problem down to Vance Brand. “With all these other procedures you’ve been working on there, I thought I was going to have a new one for you: how to get four gingerbread cubes apart. I think they were stuck together with epoxy.”

  Brand told him the nutrition experts had to make them tough to withstand the G forces at launch.

  “You can tell we’re feeling pretty good, Vance, when we start complaining about the food,” Haise joked.

  But in fact, Haise was starting to feel miserable. His last session in the command module had left him chilled to the bone. His headache had gotten worse, and he felt a fever coming on.

  More importantly, something was pushing his spacecraft off course. Haise had noticed something new venting outside the window of the command module. No one could figure out what it was, but it seemed to be affecting their path through space. If they couldn’t correct it, and correct it precisely, they were in big trouble.

  At about 11:55 a.m. on Friday, April 17, Apollo 13 would come rocketing into Earth’s atmosphere at 24,600 miles per hour. That’s where the final test would take place—just 60 miles above the Pacific Ocean, where the vacuum of space meets the thick layer of gases that envelops the Earth. And that is when their course would have to be exactly on target. Come in a little too shallow and the atmosphere would bounce you right back into space. Come in too steep and you’d plunge so abruptly into the atmosphere that friction would melt the heat shield. The command module would be fried by heat more than three times the temperature of an erupting volcano.

  Haise tries to keep warm aboard the powered-down lunar module.

  By evening, that was the problem on Jim Lovell’s mind. Their course was leaning toward the shallow side of the reentry corridor—the side that would bring them 60 miles from home only to send them hurtling back into space. At 10:30 p.m. Houston time, they were going to fire the thrusters for 15 seconds, just enough to nudge the spacecraft back on course.

  Houston had finally given Lovell a way to align the spacecraft for the burn. But he couldn’t quite believe what they wanted him to do. At that point, the Earth was only partially lit by the sun. From their perspective it looked just the way the moon does in the early part of its cycle—like a crescent. Houston wanted him to maneuver the spacecraft until one of the crosshairs in his telescope lay neatly across the two points of the crescent—the horns, so to speak. They insisted that would put the ship in exactly the right alignment for the burn.

  Lovell wasn’t so sure. He and Borman and Anders had tested the Earth alignment on Apollo 8 and decided it was too risky to use as anything but a last resort. You might as well rely on prayer to align a spacecraft, Lovell had thought.

  Now, a year and a half later, he had no other choice.

  A little after 10 p.m., Haise let Jack Lousma know they were working on the crazy scheme.

  “We’re manuevering around here to fish for the Earth,” he said.

  Lovell worked the hand controls for 15 minutes until the blue-and-white crescent appeared exactly where Houston wanted it. At least he was learning how to steer his truck with the 60,000-pound trailer attached.

  “Okay, Houston,” he reported. “We have our attitude set.”

  “Roger, Jim,” said Jack Lousma.

  “I hope the guys in the back room who thought this up knew what they were saying,” Lovell added.

  Lousma did not respond.

  Ten minutes later, the crew took their places. This time, with the equipment powered down, they had no automatic pilot to run the burn for them. They’d have to do it the old-fashioned way. Haise and Lovell gripped the hand controls. Swigert stood by to time the burn on his watch. He watched the second hand sweep around and started the countdown, “Ten … nine … eight …” At “one,” Lovell hit a big red button and the LEM engine once again rumbled to life beneath them, this time at a gentle 10 percent of its full power. Haise worked the thrusters to keep the crosshairs of the telescope resting on the horns of the Earth. Swigert called out the seconds as they passed.

  When Lovell heard “fourteen,” he waited a beat and brought his hand down hard on the shutdown button. As the vibrations of the engine died away, Haise sighte
d through the telescope. The Earth was exactly where it was supposed to be.

  “Okay,” said Lousma. “Looks good. Nice work.”

  “Let’s hope it was,” said Haise.

  For Lovell, Haise, and Swigert, the burn meant one more hurdle cleared. In 30 hours they would try to nurse the command module back to life. At that point, they would find out if all the effort of the last three days had been successful. Until then, the mission of the Apollo 13 crew would be a grueling contest of endurance.

  Temperatures in the command module had dropped to about 40 degrees. Condensation coated the windows with droplets of water. A tank full of drinking water had frozen solid. When Lovell touched metal in the frigid ship it felt like it sapped the heat from his body and sent it out into space. When he pulled a few hot dogs out of the food locker they had to be thawed before the crew could eat them.

  “Okay,” said Swigert at one point, “going back up into the refrigerator now.”

  “Hey, I thought it was the bedroom,” said Vance Brand.

  “Well, it’s got a new name now because it is about 30 degrees cooler.”

  “Roger,” said Brand, “returning to the deep freeze.”

  By Thursday, Lovell, Haise, and Swigert had given up trying to sleep in Odyssey. Haise found a pocket of warmth in the tunnel with his feet stretched back toward the command module. From the LEM it looked like he was sleeping upside down.

  In reality, he wasn’t sleeping much at all. Haise had developed some kind of infection that gave him a raging fever. He spent a lot of time shivering in a corner of the LEM with his arms clutched to his chest for warmth. At one point, Lovell wrapped Haise in his arms to keep him warm.

  As Thursday wore on, Lovell became more and more aware of the ticking clock. John Aaron had been down in Houston for days figuring out how to get the command module powered up. Lovell knew it was a complicated process. Aaron came up with the steps. Ken Mattingly, who still hadn’t come down with the measles, tested them out in the simulator. Aaron watched the results and revised the plan. Then they’d go through it all again.