by Neil Oliver
According to legend, it’s to the summit of the Brocken, tallest of Germany’s Harz Mountains, that the Devil summons all his witches on the night of April 30 each year before taking them into the underworld. It’s a place of mischief. It was in factories beneath those same mountains that von Braun’s rockets were built—and where an unknown number of innocent and uncomprehending lives were used up and thrown away. But when in the last months of the war von Braun guessed Hitler’s sun was about to be eclipsed, he betrayed his master and placed himself, and scores of his fellow scientists, into the hands of the Americans. He knew such a move would ensure the continuation of his work, and that was all that mattered. America was delighted to have him. It was the undoubted genius of von Braun, tainted though it was, that eventually gave the US the Saturn V rocket that would propel all the Apollo astronauts beyond Earth’s grasp and out toward the unsullied moon.
But the best and worst of times and men often travel together—as though one draws the other. Away from the politics, the dream of traveling into space had reached out, faster than the speed of sound, toward brave men. It reached the ears of the test pilots at Edwards Air Force base—men who risked their lives every day in the bright cloudless skies high above California’s Mojave Desert. Here was home to men who were already legends. King of kings was Captain Chuck Yeager, who had broken the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 rocket plane on October 14, 1947—but who would never sit in a space capsule. He had no college degree and so lacked a minimum requirement for the job of spaceman. (It’s said he felt that flight in a space capsule—deprived of the means of actually flying it but traveling instead as a kind of glorified passenger—was beneath an aviator’s dignity. It was Yeager or someone close to him who dismissed the Mercury astronauts as “spam in a can.”)
But the credo of the test pilots was about being the best. Author Tom Wolfe described their essential quality as “The Right Stuff,” in his book of the same name, and defined it as the instinctive ability to always do the right thing at the right time. The men selected for the Mercury program in 1959 didn’t try to be good, they simply were good.
It was also about unspoken personal bravery—of the sort Shepard showed in 1961 when he told his ground crew to get on with their job. Wolfe recounts an anecdote thought to have come out of the Korean War. A young pilot in a dogfight found an enemy MiG locked onto his tail and preparing to fire. Radio channels were kept clear for all but essential tactical communications—but the youngster was filling the airwaves with his shouts and cries, begging to be told how to save his skin. In a break in his transmission another flyer cut in and told him: “Shut up—and die like an aviator.”
Such was the way of the flyers, and it was this hard, straight edge they brought to the race for space. The first of them, the so-called Mercury 7 of Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton were fêted as champions selected for mortal combat—much like gladiators, or Spartan hoplites. These were the men who stepped up in the days before deep space flight was even possible, far less taken for granted, and for that reason, perhaps, they were the bravest of them all—whether they had to fly their ships or not.
By the time Mercury had run its course, NASA—the specially created National Aeronautics and Space Administration—had learned how to put men into Earth-orbit and bring them back alive. More astronauts followed, ready to slip the surly bonds of Earth, and by 1963 the Gemini Program, successor to Mercury, was teaching them to dock vehicles in space. Jim Lovell, the man who would later command Apollo 13, was among them.
The Apollo Program had been running since 1962 and began to send men into space in 1968, but not before the dream of the moon had claimed its first lives. On January 27, 1967, the crew of Apollo 1—Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee—were in their command module conducting launchpad tests. Their official flight designation was AS-204 (it would be renamed Apollo 1 later, as a mark of respect) and they were scheduled to be the first of the Apollo astronauts to fly. All three were strapped into their seats, wearing full flight suits and helmets, when a technical fault caused a fire inside the module. It’s estimated that all three were dead within 17 seconds, although it’s hard to imagine how anyone can be certain about such a thing. It still sounds like a long time to be strapped inside a fire.
In December 1968 Apollo 8 became the first manned flight to finally break free of Earth’s gravity and head for someplace new—the moon. Aboard were Frank Borman, William Anders and Jim Lovell. During their flight they orbited the moon 10 times in 20 hours before returning safely home. These, then, were the first men to fly above another world and it does all seem like too much to believe. The further we get from that decade, when such things were briefly made possible, the easier it is to imagine none of it ever really happened. We don’t even have the Concorde any more. Will our children believe it was once commonplace to fly across the Atlantic in three and a half hours, faster than a bullet from a rifle, let alone fly on a rocket to the moon?
You couldn’t make it up. No wonder the world’s biggest conspiracy theory claims that man has never been to the moon and that the film of the Apollo 11 landing was a fake directed by Stanley Kubrick. NASA had to learn everything that was required of space flight: not just how to get to the moon, but even how to train to get to the moon. Everything about it was new and being imagined and invented from scratch. But perhaps if they were really going to fake the moon landings, Grissom, White and Chaffee wouldn’t have had to burn to death.
Apollo 11 blasted off from the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island in Brevard County, Florida, at just a couple of minutes after 9:30 a.m. local time on July 16, 1969. The Saturn V rocket that lifted them clear of Earth’s gravity was a wonder to behold. There’s no other way to describe it. The first of its kind had carried Lovell’s Apollo 8 into space as well. In all, 32 Saturns would take to the air and not one of them would fail. The Saturn V stood 363 feet tall, less than a foot shorter than the dome of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, and was made up of 3 million parts. Every one of the components in that impossible maze of technology, inside a cylinder taller than a 30-story building, had to work the first time in order for the rocket to function properly—and they did, every time. The Vehicle Assembly Building—the VAB—in Florida, in which the Saturns were put together like the world’s most exciting toys, also has dimensions that are too much to take in. Although technically a single-story building, it stands 525 feet tall. Inside it encloses 129,428,000 cubic feet of space, and the people who’ve worked inside it insist it has its own weather system. When the conditions are just right clouds form, up toward the ceiling.
On the final descent to the moon’s surface, Armstrong was at the controls of the lunar module, a fragile bird of a thing appropriately named Eagle. They overshot the planned landing site, finally touching down into the dust with just seconds’ worth of fuel to spare. If Yeager had ever been right about astronauts being spam in a can, it wasn’t true by 1969 and Apollo 11. Armstrong had needed every ounce of his undoubted brilliance as a test pilot to put the Eagle safely onto the surface. And while he and Aldrin prepared for their first steps, 60 miles above them their command module pilot, Michael Collins, was embarking upon his own odyssey. For the first time a man would travel alone into the blackness of the moon’s dark side. The moon does not rotate, keeping the same face always toward the Earth. When Collins hurtled into that nothingness he was more alone than any human being had ever been.
Apollo 13 blasted away from the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center a couple of minutes before quarter past two in the afternoon of April 11, 1970. Its 42-year-old commander, Jim Lovell, from Cleveland, Ohio, was already the most traveled human being in history. He’d spent more than 570 hours in space, traveling a distance of around 7 million miles. As this latest journey got under way he became the first astronaut to make four journeys into space. He’d joined the US Navy in 1952 and flown jets in the Korean War before being s
elected for the space program in 1962. In the official NASA photographs taken before Apollo 13, wearing his flight suit, he has on his face the vaguely bashful and startled expression of someone who can’t quite believe his luck. He was generally considered easygoing, but those closest to him detected the competitive spirit that would elevate him to the status of mission commander.
He’d been back-up commander for Apollo 11—Armstrong’s understudy—and if things had gone as NASA originally planned, would have been the skipper of Apollo 14. As it turned out, the powers that be felt Apollo 13’s scheduled commander, Alan Shepard, needed more time to get back up to speed after a long lay-off following surgery for Menière’s disease. Shepard and his team were therefore ordered to swap with Lovell’s. Fate had played her hand, and now Lovell and his men had Apollo 13. In a further twist, they faced a last-minute change of personnel. Ken Mattingly had been training as the command module pilot, but with just days to go before the scheduled launch he was found to have been exposed to German measles. While Lovell and Haise had had the disease in childhood, and so could be expected to remain healthy during the flight, Mattingly had not. He was duly bumped out of the line and replaced by Jack Swigert.
Born in Denver, Colorado, the quiet and unassuming 38-year-old Swigert had obtained his private pilot’s licence by the age of 16. He’d flown jets in Korea and joined the space program in 1966. Apollo 13 would be his one and only space flight.
Fred Haise was the youngest of the three, just 36 years old. He was from Biloxi, Mississippi, and had been a NASA test pilot at Edwards. Like Swigert, he joined the space program in 1966 and before the twist of fate that put him on Apollo 13 he’d been back-up lunar module pilot for Apollo 9. He had the same role for Apollo 11, making him understudy for Buzz Aldrin. As good luck would have it, he’d made a point of becoming an expert on the design and use of landing modules. It was knowledge that would shortly matter a great deal. No one made Haise acquire this detailed understanding of the craft that would soon mean so much to him and his two colleagues. He had done it for himself and by himself. This is presumably part of what it means to have “the right stuff.”
The launch of Apollo 13 went well—although superstition had been running high. For a start, there was that fateful mission number. Second, Lovell’s wife Marilyn had lost her wedding ring before the flight took off. ’Til death do us part. The loss was featured in the 1995 film Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks, and although at first thought to be a fiction added into the plot for dramatic effect, Lovell admitted later that it had actually happened.
Days one and two of the mission unfolded much as planned. One of the engines had cut out a couple of minutes early—no harm done, though, and Lovell and Co. might have been entitled to think that that had been their inevitable hiccup. At 55 hours into the flight they began a scheduled television broadcast for the folks back home. Lovell’s tape recorder, floating around the command module, played “Aquarius” from the musical film Hair as well as “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. They were making it look easy, commonplace.
Shortly after the broadcast came to a close, the good times ended for Apollo 13. A warning light had come on back at Houston, telling the technicians that pressure was dropping in one of the onboard hydrogen tanks. This was nothing particularly worrying in itself, and Mission Control simply told the crew of Apollo 13 to turn on a set of cryogenic fans and heaters. This was a routine action known as “stirring the tanks.” There was nothing at all routine about what happened next.
All seemed well enough for about another minute and a half, and then Lovell, Swigert and Haise heard a loud bang—not the kind of noise an astronaut wants to hear while he’s floating inside a tin can, 200,000 miles from home. Looking outside, the astronauts could see evidence of an explosion—exposed wires, missing panels—and some sort of vapor or gas streaming into space.
Back at Mission Control, they already knew something bad had happened. For two whole seconds, Apollo 13 had gone quiet—as all radio transmissions from the ship had switched off. In the momentary silence, Swigert had spoken into the void.
“OK, Houston,” he said. “Hey, we’ve had a problem.”
Once the radio came back on, gentleman Jim Lovell repeated the gist of the line, but with a change of tense.
“OK, Houston,” he said. “We have a problem.”
No panic and no swearing. Cars have been parked with more anxiety.
What they couldn’t know then—but what an inquiry would establish later on—was that there’d been a short circuit inside one of the tanks when the crew attempted the “stir.” Teflon insulation around an electrical motor on an internal fan was damaged and a small fire broke out, eventually causing an explosion that blew apart one of the ship’s oxygen tanks and damaged the other. What all this meant was that the command module was now bleeding to death. The vapor they saw venting into space was the gas they depended on to keep themselves and the onboard systems alive. When the oxygen tank exploded, part of the panel covering it had blown off and hit the radio transmitter on the side of the capsule—hence the two-second-long radio blackout noticed by Mission Control.
When you hear about events like these—matters of life and death—it’s tempting to assume the necessary decision and actions were being taken and made by men of our dads’ age: true grown-ups. But the ones who looked after the astronauts during the space flights of the 1960s and early 70s were hardly men at all, more like boys. The scientists and technicians now staring into computer screens and preparing to deal with whatever had just happened to Apollo 13 had an average age of 26. Gene Kranz was Director of Mission Operations until 1994. When Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, he was 35 years old.
“I was the old man,” he said.
The screens and readouts were telling Mission Control that the command module, Odyssey, erstwhile home for the three astronauts, was dying. If urgent action were not taken, Lovell, Swigert and Haise would die along with it. Mission Control ordered the three men to go through the routines required to “power down”—switch off the module. Until the men on the ground could figure out how to bring it back to fully functioning life, the crew would have to find somewhere else to live.
Apollo 13 the movie has the three men shouting at each other at this point, trying to figure out if one of them is to blame for what has just happened. The truth aboard Odyssey was less dramatic but more impressive by far. Instead of panicking, they went about their assigned tasks quietly and calmly. With all power off inside the command module, the temperature dropped uncomfortably low. It was dark in there too, and it was at this point in the drama that the crew moved into the lunar module.
Despite there being barely enough room to turn around inside Aquarius, far less swing a cat, it would have to be their temporary home; their fragile life raft in an ocean of black. Apollo 13 was supposed to be about a moon landing. That target was gone now, along with the contents of the command module’s oxygen tanks.
By then, in 1970, landing on the moon had been accomplished twice. After Armstrong and Aldrin, Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad and Alan Bean had repeated the trick. Facing the crew of Apollo 13 was something quite new. They had to find a way to stay alive and get back home after just about everything that could go wrong had gone wrong.
Having watched those two moon landings, the viewing public had lost interest in the space race by the time Apollo 13’s astronauts were showing them weightless tape recorders. But as news of the accident was transmitted, people around the world suddenly found a new reason to be enthralled by events unfolding high above their heads.
On April 14, Apollo 13 made its loop around the moon. Lovell was looking down at a familiar view, but for his fellow travelers it was all new. As they passed around into the dark side, they were a long way from their intended lunar orbit. In fact their unintended but now unavoidable path meant they were all of 200 miles above the moon’s surface. For as long as that long, lonely loop continued, they wer
e further from home than any human beings before or since.
Down on the ground, the 26-year-olds were trying to find solutions to a set of problems that no one had ever imagined before. At Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Mission Control in Texas, two teams began simulating the conditions controlling the astronauts’ lives. Every solution was tested on the ground to prove it worked before any instructions were transmitted to Aquarius. In simple terms, there were two tasks:
To keep the three men alive.
To repair the crippled spacecraft to the point where it was capable of bringing them home.
But while hundreds of men scurried around trying to find answers, three men were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder inside a fragile bubble of air. They were more than four days from home and their life raft, Aquarius, was only designed to keep two men alive for 48 hours. While on the dark side of the moon, the astronauts were ordered to fire the lunar module engines to speed up their return. This was not what the engines had been designed for—they were only intended for use in getting to and from the moon’s surface—but the frightening move was executed perfectly by Lovell. The three were now 12 hours closer to home.
Kennedy Space Center engineers found a way to use the lunar module’s electrical system to recharge that of the stricken command module. Others came up with a way of using some of the men’s drinking water to double as a cooling system. Easily the most pressing problem was the atmosphere inside the module. With three of them breathing the same limited air, the level of deadly carbon dioxide was rising fast. Even this challenge was safely met. A filtration system cobbled together from plastic notebook covers, cardboard and any thing else known to be aboard Aquarius was assembled on the ground before the instructions for its assembly were sent to the crew.