by Jay Barbree
At two minutes and forty seconds before the burn, Houston CapCom Vance Brand radioed a voice check.
“Roger, we got you,” Jim Lovell responded through a storm of air-to-ground static.
There was long silence, then Brand called, “One minute.”
“Roger,” Lovell acknowledged and returned to silence.
One minute passed, and Lovell reported, “We’re burning forty percent.”
“Houston copies.”
“One hundred percent,” Lovell announced, excitedly.
“Roger.” Static roared full-blown into their headsets. “Aquarius, Houston. You’re looking good.”
The lunar module’s descent rocket was at full thrust, and every person involved was holding his breath.
“Aquarius, you’re still looking good at two minutes.”
“Roger,” Lovell answered.
“Aquarius, you’re go at three minutes.”
“Roger.”
The life-saving rocket burn was just beautiful.
“Aquarius, ten seconds to go,” reported Brand.
“Five, four, three, two, one.”
“Shutdown!” Lovell smiled.
“Roger. Shutdown. Good burn, Jim,” and the Apollo 13 train chugged on.
The major milestone of their uncertain flight was behind them. But cold and wet, their teeth chattering in the powered-down spacecraft they called the refrigerator, the astronauts of Apollo 13 were lonely. Ahead were sixty-three uncomfortable hours of crossing the quarter-of-a-million-mile void. Even though each hour was getting them closer and closer to home, Deke Slayton was becoming more and more concerned for the astronauts’ emotional state. They were sleeping only in short catnaps. They were not only worn out, their food was frozen, and for drinking water they had to suck on ice cubes. “Damn it,” cursed Slayton, “they need rest.” They were now two days away from reentry and were needed at their best.
Lovell smiled and told Mission Control, “We’re three men cold as frogs in a frozen pond.”
Slayton laughed and moved into the CapCom’s chair. “Hey, guys, this is Deke.”
“Hey, Boss,” Lovell answered. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going great, Jim,” he answered as if he were enjoying his favorite rocking chair. “Just wanted you guys to know we’re in great shape. Las Vegas says it’s a hundred to one we’re gonna get you back.” Slayton didn’t mind lying when it was necessary. “We think the odds are better than that. You guys are in good shape all the way around. Now, I just had to break a few heads down here to make sure they leave you alone so you can get some sleep. I want you guys rested and at the top of your game come reentry. You’ve already proven you are three of the best pilots we have in the Astronaut Office. Let’s put that thing on the deck of the recovery ship. Okay?”
“Okay, Boss,” Lovell acknowledged.
“And Jim,” Slayton grinned. “According to your mother if we gave you a washing machine to fly, her Jimmy could land it. Is that true?”
“You betcha, Boss,” Lovell laughed. “With or without wings.”
“Get some sleep,” Slayton said, laughing too. “We’ll call if we need you.”
This was Boss Deke Slayton talking. The man they trusted implicitly. Deke’s personal touch did the trick. Soon those cold frogs were snoozing in their icy pond.
More than a billion of Earth’s people listened to every broadcast, camped out in front of their radios and televisions, staying within earshot of every report. Such an extraordinary effort had never before been launched to save three humans. People of every faith prayed. Apollo 13 was headed for a splashdown near American Samoa. There the aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima waited to fish the rescued from the sea.
Since the beginning of the four-day emergency, I had been on the air with few breaks. The phone in our NBC broadcast trailer outside Mission Control rang.
“Jay, this is Russ Tornabene.”
“Hi, Boss,” I smiled. “What’s up?”
“Following the splashdown,” Russ began, “President Nixon will be flying to Mission Control to congratulate the flight controllers, and then on to Honolulu to meet the Apollo 13 astronauts. We want you to join the White House Press Corps in Houston and make the trip with the President.”
“You realize this is going to cut into my splashdown party big time, Boss?”
“Party on the plane,” Russ said, laughing.
Apollo 13 was wrapped snugly in the arms of Earth’s gravity, racing toward reentry as Jack Swigert floated forward from Aquarius to start the “reincarnation” of the command ship Odyssey. He drifted into what had been a familiar spaceship cabin to find a cold and clammy flight deck. Every piece of equipment and instrument was soaked. His fear was that the icy water had seeped into electrical connections, and circuit points were waiting to arc into instant flame once power began to flow.
Swigert moved one switch at a time to return life to his Apollo, and because Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee had given their lives in the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire, every circuit in Odyssey held solid. No arcing, no short circuits. Swigert peered down the connecting tunnel and called to Lovell and Haise, giving them a thumbs-up.
Lovell said a quiet prayer, giving personal thanks too to Apollo 1’s crew, and Swigert switched on the three batteries needed to power the command module during reentry. Two batteries were fully charged but the third was low, so Swigert went back to Aquarius for a power cable. He returned and recharged the weak battery from the lunar module’s power supply.
Astronaut Haise called Mission Control. “What are you guys reading for cabin temperature in the command module?”
“We’re reading 45 to 46 degrees,” Houston replied.
“Now you see why we call it a refrigerator.”
“Uh-huh. Sounds like a cold winter day up there. Is it snowing in the command module yet?”
“No,” Haise grinned. “Not yet.”
“You’ll have some time on the beach in Samoa to thaw out.”
“Sounds great.”
More fighter-pilot banter, good for the nerves as Apollo 13’s astronauts slipped into the final hours. They were getting set to fly a reentry from the moon on Friday morning, April 17, 1970, just over five hours before splashdown. One last time, Lovell fired the lunar module’s small steering thrusters to improve his landing-target accuracy.
An hour later, Swigert separated his command module from the Apollo 13’s battered service module. Lovell snapped several photographs as the section of the ship that had caused all the trouble drifted away. “There’s one whole side of the spacecraft missing,” Lovell reported. “The whole panel is blown out almost from the base of the engine…It’s really a mess.”
Three hours later, just one hour away from punching through the atmosphere, Lovell and Haise moved into the restored command module. They closed the double hatches of the connecting tunnel, triple-checked the seals, and pressurized the connecting passageway. They fired the explosive bolts designed to separate Apollo from the lunar module, and, just as expected, the LM popped away like a champagne cork.
“Farewell, Aquarius, and we thank you,” Mission Control called with a salute to the astronauts’ lifeboat.
“She was a good ship,” Lovell said with emotion.
Odyssey, along with its crew of three, plowed into Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 miles per hour—a speed at which it would take the astronauts only six minutes to cross the United States. Instantly, they were feeling the pressures of deceleration, and instantly they were surprised. It wasn’t snowing, but it was raining inside Apollo 13’s command ship. As the temperature rose and the forces of gravity grew, the icy mush that had saturated the command module’s interworks broke free in a sudden shower, pooling along the bottom around their booted feet.
Then, Apollo 13 was deep into the fires of reentry. For three minutes the ship was encased in heat hotter than a volcano’s bowels. A plasma sheath formed around the spacecraft, cutting off all communications.
&n
bsp; Clocks crawled.
Mission Control was a church of silence.
Squawk boxes crackled. A tracking aircraft over the Pacific radioed. It had picked up a signal from Apollo 13. No one cheered. Not yet. What about the heat shield? Had it held? Or was it damaged in the explosion? And what about the parachutes? Had they opened?
Apollo 13 broke through a cloud deck two thousand feet above the ocean riding beneath three huge orange-and-white parachutes. Mission Control went mad with relief, applause, and cheering.
Unbelievably, Apollo 13 splashed down only three miles from the Iwo Jima.
Jim Lovell and crew were lifted by helicopter to the deck of their prime recovery ship, and splashdown parties worldwide burst into wild and thankful celebrations.
In Houston it was 12:07 P.M. April 17, 1970, three days and fifteen hours to the minute since Apollo 13’s oxygen tank 2 exploded.
In the Lovell home, Pete Conrad, the commander of Apollo 12, opened the first bottle of champagne. Buzz Aldrin grabbed the second, and he and Neil Armstrong popped the cork. Others followed. In the midst of hugs and screams of joy, Jim Lovell’s wife, Marilyn, heard the phone ring. She ran into the master bedroom and picked it up.
“Mrs. Lovell?”
“Yes.”
“Hold for the President.”
She couldn’t take her eyes off the television. She watched her husband’s spacecraft bob in the Pacific as she danced in place, about to burst with joy.
“Marilyn, this is the President. I wanted to know if you’d care to accompany me to Hawaii to pick up your husband.”
“Mr. President,” she said, laughing, “I’d love to. How soon can you get here?”
Mr. Nixon was there bright and early the next morning, shaking the hands of the flight controllers who had snatched Apollo 13 from the jaws of failure, and soon Air Force One was winging its way to Hawaii.
As ordered, I had joined the White House Press Corps for the trip. Amidst Hawaii’s swaying palms and a cheering assemblage of thousands, the President welcomed Apollo 13’s astronauts home. We reporters filed our reports and took to the Honolulu sun. We were walking on clouds instead of sand, but my thoughts were with my friend Alan Shepard. Thanks to pioneering surgery that had corrected Shepard’s inner ear problem, he was back on flight status and had been given command of Apollo 14.
We all knew the near-fatal flight of Apollo 13 would delay Apollo 14. There could be no other way. Every nut, bolt, and inch of the Apollo’s service module would need to undergo inspection, review, and design improvement. And thanks to President Nixon, we also knew Apollo 14 would fly. Mr. Nixon had promised NASA that America would return to the moon, and I knew the burden of saving the country’s space program would again fall on the shoulders of America’s first in space.
As darkness fell over the island, I found myself walking alone in the balmy spring night, trying to ease my thoughts. The success of the Apollo 13 rescue gave all Americans great pride in the men and women of NASA. But I had been there from the beginning. The first Russian cosmonaut flights had mocked America’s stumbling efforts to ascend to Earth orbit. Alan Shepard was to have led the way as the first man in space, but the stumbling block then had been lack of confidence, not the reliability of the rocket, and Shepard had had to settle for being the first American in space.
He had been called upon then to save America’s space future from the myopic, from those who were so eager to quit in the face of what they judged to be Russian superiority. They were convinced the Russians could never be matched, let alone exceeded. The decade since has shown them to be wrong, and we of confidence, this night, were aware that even though Apollo 13’s crew had been safely returned to Earth, the never-finish-anything crowd were certain the mission had been a failure.
It was equally clear to us that Alan Shepard had more than a space flight to command. He again carried the full weight of Apollo on his shoulders. If Apollo 14 succeeded, he would share the accolades. If it failed, he alone would bear the burden. I found comfort in the thought that I was damn sure Shepard was up to it.
Jack King (second from right) escorts astronaut Alan Shepard (third from right) and his crew as their mammoth Apollo 14 moon rocket is moved to its launch pad. (NASA).
The next morning, Apollo 13’s astronauts were headed home to take their place in NASA’s future. Instead of Apollo 13 being NASA’s darkest defeat, it was clearly the agency’s finest hour, thanks to the men and women who would not accept failure as an option.
Inside the wings of Air Force One and the White House Press Corps’ jet on April 19, 1970, sat the mellow and satisfied. Who said a superb glass of wine wasn’t good for the soul?
Below, for that single day at least, all was right on a planet called Earth.
SIXTEEN
On the Moon
Astronauts Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell had named their lunar module Antares, and after their quarter-of-a-million-mile journey of fits and starts, they were on the moon, ready to plant their boots in lunar soil. Shepard was first. He stepped off Antares’s small porch and moved slowly down the ladder. He paused on the last rung. The last three-and-a-half feet were only a lazy drop for the carrier pilot.
Like the mythical bird of yore, NASA’s Apollo 14 Phoenix had risen from Apollo 13’s ashes, equipped with more reliable hardware and safeguards. But, more important to members of the space family, America’s first astronaut was in command. Alan Shepard would be the only one of the Mercury group to reach the moon. He had gone for all seven, for all of us who’d been there with him from the beginning. The lunar dust he’d kicked up with his drop to the surface settled quickly as he paused. “It’s been a long way,” the son of New Hampshire spoke quietly, “but…we’re here!”
Alan was talking about all the years he and his friend Deke Slayton had been grounded with ailments, all the years they’d watched others go, and Deke in Mission Control answered with affection, “Not bad for an old man.”
Shepard had reached the moon at age forty-seven. The country’s original astronaut turned slowly, pushing his boots into the grayish-brown dust, reminding himself no living creature had ever done this before in this desolate, silent world. “Gazing around at the bleak landscape, it certainly is a stark place here at Fra Mauro,” he said as if he were speaking only to Deke and those in Mission Control. “It’s made all the more stark by the fact that the sky is completely dark.” He surveyed the wide lunar landscape, turning his back to the dazzling sun. “This is a very tough place, guys.”
Ed Mitchell worked his way down the ladder. The MIT Ph.D. of everything technical dropped to the surface and quickly began moving about, testing his body’s reactions to the weak gravity in a world one-sixth the mass of his own. Mitchell was the first of a new breed of astronaut. He was a member of academia instead of flying warriors, and he found the moon a playground for learning.
“Mobility is very great under this ‘crushing’ one-sixth g-load,” Mitchell quipped.
He and Shepard gathered samples of rocks and soil into containers to please the scientists back home. They placed their remote television camera sixty feet away so those on Earth could watch them setting up their experiments. They unloaded a new device for hauling materials across the lunar landscape. The engineers named it a modularized equipment transport, or MET, but Mitchell and Shepard simply called it their lunar rickshaw.
The rickshaw carried an extensive supply of tools, cameras, instruments, safety line, core tubes for digging into the lunar crust, and maps and charts for the two moonwalkers to navigate their way through and around craters, gullies, and boulder fields.
Overhead, their command ship, Kitty Hawk, raced across the moon’s black sky. Crewmate Stuart Roosa had remained at Kitty Hawk’s controls, and he continued his circling of Earth’s natural satellite. Every two hours he was making one complete pass around the moon, and suddenly his voice became very excited. “I can see Antares on the surface!” he told Mission Control. Sunlight gleamed from the spidery moon
ship surrounded by a bright and new wide area of dust that had been splayed outward by Antares’s landing.
When Roosa reached the moon’s other side, he made further thrilling discoveries. He swept Kitty Hawk’s cameras across craters never seen from Earth, including an extremely bright crater directly beneath his orbital path. Unseen, unknown by astronomers, it was a meteoric impact that was only weeks, possibly months, old—a virgin crater on a world that had been bombarded with such impacts for 4.6 billion years.
Back on the lunar surface, Alan Shepard was looking upward into the blackest of skies, thrilled at the blue-and-brown miracle that was his home planet. One-third of Earth hung magically suspended, floating. “That was breathtaking! The ice caps over the poles, the white clouds, the blue water…gorgeous, Barbree, just gorgeous!” he would tell me later with an excitement and a knowing he had seen something reserved for the gods.
“Earth,” he explained, “is limitless to everyone with its vast oceans and towering mountains. There’s always a distant horizon and changing dawns and sunsets. But looking at Earth from the moon, earth is in fact very finite, very fragile…so incredibly fragile. That thin, thin atmosphere, the thinnest shell of air hugging the planet, it can be blown away so easily! A meteor, a cataclysmic volcano, man’s own uncaring.”
Suddenly this master of wings and rocket fire, hero to millions, confessed to me that he had unashamedly wept with his boots planted firmly in lunar soil. Tears streaked down his cheeks as he stood praying for our only safe port in this corner of the universe. Minutes passed before he could stop his tears and prayers, before he could force himself out of his introspection.
Not only was Alan Shepard a sensitive person, the future admiral was a tough, no-nonsense “get ’er done” leader, and he knew their assignments on the moon demanded attention and labor, so he and Mitchell continued their appointed tasks. They strode and bunny-hopped in their spacesuits hundreds of feet from the protection of their lander Antares. Those on Earth watching the moonwalkers’ television images learned quickly that the lunar landscape is a visual illusion. What seems flat and featureless is much like an ocean surface on Earth. The “flatness” is in reality a long-waved undulation of the moonscape, and several times during their moonwalk, the astronauts’ exertion while toting heavy loads, bending and stooping to lift rocks, gave Mission Control reason for alarm. They could hear the astronauts grunting, sometimes loudly sucking in oxygen. The flight controllers realized they were pushing too hard, overloading bodies already drained by the demands of launch and flight to the moon.