by Tod Olson
At some point, though, they were going to have to stop. At noon, Lovell told Joe Kerwin, the CAPCOM on duty, that he was eager to have the procedures in hand.
“They exist,” Kerwin said, trying to be reassuring. In fact, with about 18 hours to go, Aaron was still revising and re-revising.
And so they waited, sandwiched into a cockpit no bigger than a station wagon. Once or twice, when Kerwin was at the console, he slipped in a bit of news from home. “Everything’s running real smooth over in Timber Cove, Jim,” he would say. Just a few comforting words—no more than that.
In the afternoon, Haise was moving stuff around to get it stowed for reentry when he came across a small bag with a few personal items he’d been allowed to bring aboard. In it were pictures of his family and a note his pregnant wife had slipped in: “By the time you read this you will already have landed on the moon and, hopefully, be on your way back to Earth. This is to let you know how much we love you, how proud we are of you, and how very much we miss you. Hurry home! Love, Mary.”
The message was a sharp reminder of just how far from home they were. Lovell knew he might never make it back to Timber Cove. Haise knew his newest child might be raised without a dad. But they didn’t let those thoughts linger, and they didn’t talk about them. In the three days since the accident, Lovell, Haise, and Swigert had barely been two feet away from one another. And yet they hadn’t shared much about their lives. They hadn’t discussed regrets about their pasts or promised to live differently in the future if they made it home.
On a visit to NASA, Mary Haise gets a briefing on the plans to bring her husband home.
Like the engineers in Houston, they were trained to work the problem. Solve one and get ready for the next. For Lovell, getting home was a game of solitaire: Turn over a card and find a place to put it. If you find a place, move on to the next card. Get all the way through the deck, and you make it home. Of course, he might find himself stuck with a card that had nowhere to go. But if that thought was not going to help him win the game, it wasn’t worth thinking. It was as simple as that.
As the sun began to set in Houston, Lovell still had plenty of cards to work through—and he’d begun to worry that his crew was in no condition to play them. To conserve supplies, they’d been drinking a meager ration of 6 ounces of water a day. Dehydration had slowed their reaction time. Exhaustion wasn’t helping either. In three-and-a-half days, he and Swigert had gotten 12 hours of broken sleep. Haise had logged a few more hours, but he looked worse than his crewmates. His fever had spiked, and shivers rolled through his body in waves.
Somehow, just 10 hours from now, they had to make a course correction, power up a dead command module, jettison a service module and a LEM, and steer their way into Earth’s atmosphere. It wasn’t simply a matter of pushing a button or two. To get Odyssey powered up they would have to throw dozens of switches in exactly the right order. Before they could even start, Houston had to read up the procedures line by line so they could copy them down. That process alone was going to take hours.
All of which left Jim Lovell wondering: What in the heck was Houston doing down there?
CHAPTER 13
DAMAGE DONE
In Houston, Vance Brand was in the CAPCOM’s seat, and it was not a comfortable place to be. It was 6:30 on Thursday night. The control room had been filling with people from the back rooms, eager to hear the plans they’d been working on for days read up to the crew. Lovell, Swigert, and Haise were just as eager to receive them.
Finally, John Aaron walked into the room with a heavy stack of papers in his hands, flanked by Gene Kranz. Until a few minutes ago, Ken Mattingly had been in the simulator testing out the last of the procedures. Aaron still couldn’t say they were perfect—for that he needed weeks, not days. But he knew he was out of time.
Aaron deposited a copy of the plans on the CAPCOM’s console and Brand told the crew they were ready to go.
“Okay, Vance, I’m ready to copy,” said Swigert.
But before they could get started, Kranz and Sy Liebergot called for copies of the plan.
“Okay, Jack, wait one,” Brand said. “We want to get one into the hands of FLIGHT and EECOM, and it’ll take about a minute or two.”
He got no response.
Brand filled the dead air with questions about their water supply. Swigert answered, sounding exhausted.
By the time Kranz and Liebergot had their copies, Brand got word that more controllers were on their way from the back rooms. Each of them needed copies of the plan so they could follow the read through.
“Okay, Jack,” Brand cut in again. “All the hordes of people that devised this procedure are going to be coming into the room in a minute, and they’d like to hold up until everybody can listen in.”
Someone ran off to make copies of the plan, and Brand was left to stall again.
A half hour later, the copies still hadn’t arrived, and everyone on the air-ground loop got a taste of the tension building in the spacecraft.
“Houston, Aquarius.” It was Lovell’s exasperated voice coming through the loop.
“Go ahead, Aquarius,” said Brand.
Lovell launched in: “Vance, we’ve got to realize that we’ve got to establish a work-rest cycle up here, so we just can’t wait around here to just read procedures all the time up to the burn. We’ve got to get them up here, look at them, and then we’ve got to get the people to sleep.”
Vance Brand (center) at the CAPCOM console gets help from Jack Lousma (leaning), Ken Mattingly (standing), and others.
No voices had been raised, no words spoken that couldn’t be printed. But the message had been sent. It was Lovell making sure that the engineers understood the urgency of the situation, even with their feet planted firmly on the Earth.
“I know Jim,” Brand said. “We’re very conscious of that. We should be ready to go in about 5 minutes. That’s all I can say. Stand by.”
At 11 p.m., in the cramped quarters of the LEM, the plans finally sat in the hands of the crew. Swigert and Haise had scrawled the procedures on pages ripped out of checklists they no longer needed. It had taken three hours to get through it all—three hours of listening, writing, reading back, and correcting, with sleep-deprived brains and frozen hands.
Swigert goes over a checklist with Lovell, while the commander tries to keep his hands warm.
The crew settled in and tried to sleep, but by 2 a.m. Houston had last-minute revisions to the procedures. Jack Lousma, who had taken over as CAPCOM, urged them to get more rest, but he might as well have been asking them to sleep in a snowbank.
“Well—we’ll take it easy,” said Swigert, stumbling on his words, “but I—and we’ll try to sleep, but it’s just awful cold.”
There was no rest in sight. They were 70,000 miles from Earth and closing at more than 5,000 miles per hour. In the next ten hours, the pull of gravity would bring them up to five times that speed. There were more revisions to scratch into the checklist. Lovell had to align for one final burn, just to make sure they didn’t come in at too shallow an angle.
In the midst of all the activity, they got a piece of welcome news from Houston: They had enough resources left in the LEM to go ahead and power it up. Until they climbed into Odyssey an hour and a half before splashdown, they would ride in style.
“Hey, it’s warmed up here now,” reported Swigert at around 5 a.m on Friday. “It’s almost comfortable.”
Lovell had been keeping track of the Earth as they hurtled along, and it was noticeably closer.
“I’m looking out the window now, Jack, and the Earth is whistling in like a high-speed freight train.” He jokingly told Lousma that he was still trying to find Fra Mauro, their scheduled landing site on the moon.
“You’re going the wrong way, son,” Lousma replied.
By 7 a.m., the Earth was just five hours away and large enough that it nearly filled the window of the LEM. It had been three and a half days since some kind of explosion rocke
d the spacecraft, sent their oxygen supply streaming off into space, and ruined their trip to the moon. But they still had no idea what had happened. They’d been dragging the stricken service module for more than 80 hours without any way to see the damage. Now it was time to send the patient into space and get a look at the wound.
Swigert took his place in the still-frigid command module, with Lovell and Haise in the LEM. Two switches stood out from the rest on the panel in front of Swigert. The one on the right fired the exploding bolts to separate the service module from the command module. The one on the left would send the LEM hurtling into space—with Lovell and Haise inside. For hours, Swigert had been worried he would hit the wrong one.
They’d been joking around about just this kind of mistake on Thursday afternoon. Deke Slayton, head of flight crew operations at NASA, had been in the control room laughing about how a bunch of exhausted astronauts could screw up when they jettisoned the LEM.
“Deke says don’t forget to close the command module hatch on your way in,” radioed the CAPCOM.
“I’m already scared that Jack will have it closed before I get up there,” Lovell said.
Everyone got a good laugh out of that, but the whole thing made Swigert sweat. What would happen if his hand slipped at the last minute and jettisoned the LEM instead of the service module? Lovell and Haise would drift away for a second, but with the tunnel open. Just as they realized what had happened, three astronauts would be sucked into the vacuum of space, 40,000 miles from home.
Swigert had dug out a piece of paper and some duct tape and plastered a little sign over the switch labeled “LEM JETT.” The sign said in big capital letters, “NO.”
At 7:15 a.m., Lovell fired the LEM’s thrusters to push the spacecraft forward in the direction of the service module. Swigert hit his switch, and the ship shuddered with a distant pop. Lovell reversed the thrusters to pull Odyssey and Aquarius back.
“SM SEP,” he announced in the voice loop as the service module separated from the rest of the ship.
“Copy that,” said Joe Kerwin, who was back in the CAPCOM’s seat for the final stretch.
For two and half minutes, all three astronauts pressed their faces to the windows, trying to catch a glimpse of the damaged service module.
Finally Lovell blurted out, “Okay, I’ve got her, Houston … And there’s one whole side of that spacecraft missin’.”
“Is that right?” Kerwin said, picking up on Lovell’s astonishment.
If there had been any lingering doubt about the decision to scrap the moon landing, it was gone now.
“Right by the high gain antenna, the whole panel is blown out, almost from the base to the engine,” Lovell said.
“Man, that’s unbelievable!” said Haise.
“And Joe,” said Lovell, “looks like a lot of debris is just hanging out the side near the S-band antenna.”
One-sixth of the service module’s shell—a panel measuring about 13 feet by 6 feet—had simply vanished, and the guts of the spacecraft were dangling in space. Lovell couldn’t see the oxygen tanks, but a confusing tangle of jagged metal and shiny insulation occupied the shelf where they were supposed to be.
Damaged: The service module drifts into view with one entire panel blown off the side.
“It’s really a mess,” said Haise—a mess that could only have been made by a powerful explosion. And given where the damage was on the service module, that explosion happened far too close to the heat shield for comfort.
With four and a half hours to reentry and no way to fix a broken heat shield, Haise decided to keep that thought to himself.
CHAPTER 14
BLACKOUT
As Apollo 13 picked up speed, rocketing toward Earth, one-third of the planet’s inhabitants prepared to catch the last installment of the four-day drama on TV or in the newspapers. More than 1 billion people had supposedly followed the crew through their improvised burns and their frigid ordeal. All the major TV networks had been on the air for the milestones of the flight: “We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for a special update …” Newspapers had devoted their front pages to the three imperiled astronauts since Wednesday morning. The giant headline in the Chicago Tribune this morning read simply: “WORLD AWAITS 3.”
The pope offered a prayer for the astronauts at the Vatican in Rome. Sports stadiums went silent to honor the crew. Twelve countries offered to help rescue the spacecraft if it splashed down off target. One of them was the Soviet Union, which buried any hard feelings it had over the space race. The country’s leaders ordered two ships to change course and head for the splashdown site. Their astronauts sent a public letter out to their former rivals: “We … follow your flight with great attention and concern, and wholeheartedly wish you a safe return to the native earth.”
Walter Cronkite summed it up when he declared on a CBS broadcast, “It’s not likely that any three men have ever waged such a dramatic battle so fully in the attention of the world.”
Nowhere was that attention more focused than in Timber Cove. On the morning of April 17, forty people jammed themselves into the Lovell family room to watch the splashdown. Jeffrey roamed the house in his sailor suit, playing with a little model airplane. Susan had calmed down by now, but nerves in the room were definitely on edge.
For much of the week, Barbara had avoided the family room, but this morning she made her way in. She realized she’d worn a minidress that her father hated. He was gone so much, she sometimes felt like he was surprised to find her grown up. She’d leave for the pool in the bathing suit she wore all the time. He’d look up from the newspaper and say, “Where are you going in that?!” Or she’d leave the house in a miniskirt, and he couldn’t resist growling, “You’re going to freeze your tail off.”
Now she would give anything to hear that voice at home again.
Barbara, center, and her family take a break from the crowd in the living room to watch with Barbara’s grandmother in the den.
At 9:30 a.m. Jim Lovell’s voice reached the Earth from 24,000 miles above the clouds, and it sounded more relaxed than it had since Tuesday night. The crew had finally gotten the go-ahead to power up the command module, a mere two and a half hours before they would use it to blast their way into Earth’s atmosphere. Swigert and Haise were up there shivering in the cold while they brought the ship to life.
“We have command module AOS,” announced Joe Kerwin, telling Lovell they had acquired a signal from Odyssey for the first time since 10:30 on Tuesday night. “Request OMNI Charlie in the CM.”
Lovell turned and told his crewmates which antenna Kerwin wanted them to use.
“That,” he announced, “was sent through a new onboard communication system known as yelling through the tunnel.”
Five minutes later, Kerwin’s voice came through again. “Just to inform you we’ve got data from Odyssey, and it looks good.”
It was some of the best news Lovell had gotten in four days, and for the moment, it was enough to make him ditch the formal language of the air-ground loop. He had a working ship that just might get him home from the longest ordeal of his life, and “roger” or “affirm” were not the first words that came to mind.
“Hey, great!” was his reply.
Swigert and Haise raced through the checklist to get Odyssey fully powered up—all 39 pages and 400 steps. The surgeon on duty in Houston noted their heart rates had risen well above resting levels. Down in the LEM, the Earth had taken over Lovell’s triangular window and was racing up at him at 11,000 miles an hour.
“Jack, how you coming up there?” he yelled. “The Earth is getting bigger.”
Finally, the answer came back that the command module was fully up and running. Lovell wrestled one last time with the hand controls and positioned the ship to jettison the LEM.
“Okay, Houston, Aquarius. I am at the LEM SEP attitude and I’m planning on bailing out,” he reported.
“Okay,” said Kerwin. “I can’t think of a better ide
a.”
Before he drifted through the tunnel, Lovell took a look back at the ship that had kept them alive since the accident. It looked like a zero G garbage dump, paper and other debris floating through the air. Waving aside the trash, he found a souvenir to bring back to Earth. He said goodbye to the lunar lander and floated into the command module. Under his arm was the helmet he would have worn had he been able to walk on the moon.
Twenty-five minutes later, Jack Swigert tore his “NO” warning off the panel and flipped the switch to jettison the LEM. Twelve bolts exploded just above their heads with a loud pop, and their lifeboat drifted off into space.
Farewell, Aquarius: The LEM, with the round tunnel opening in the foreground, drifts away from the command module after separation.
“LEM JETT,” Lovell reported.
“Okay, copy that,” said Kerwin. “Farewell, Aquarius, and we thank you.”
On Earth, news stations began to broadcast live from the aircraft carrier Iwo Jima, stationed 600 miles south of Samoa, where the command module was supposed to splash down. Cameras panned across navy men in their crisp white uniforms, peering into the sky or out into the empty waters of the Pacific. Helicopters patrolled the sky, hoping for a glimpse of the capsule.
The scene played on TV sets around the world. In New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, a thousand people stood elbow to elbow, necks craned toward a screen above the ticket windows. In Chicago, more than 400 people gathered in the Admiral television showroom on Michigan Avenue. Hundreds more watched from outside. Nine minutes before splashdown, an ambulance screeched down the street and no one turned to look.
Thousands gather in New York’s Grand Central Terminal, hoping to see a successful splashdown.
At Timber Cove, Barbara found a place in front of the TV next to her mother and Susan. Jeffrey settled into his mom’s lap. All they could do was watch and wait.