1970
Apollo 13 Launched to Moon
On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13, the third
lunar landing mission, is successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida,
carrying astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise. The
spacecraft’s destination was the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon, where the
astronauts were to explore the Imbrium Basin and conduct geological
experiments. After an oxygen tank exploded on the evening of April 13, however,
the new mission objective became to get the Apollo 13 crew home alive.
At 9:00 p.m. EST on April 13, Apollo 13
was just over 200,000 miles from Earth. The crew had just completed a
television broadcast and was inspecting Aquarius, the Landing Module
(LM). The next day, Apollo 13 was to enter the moon’s orbit, and soon
after, Lovell and Haise would become the fifth and sixth men to walk on the
moon. At 9:08 p.m., these plans were shattered when an explosion rocked the
spacecraft. Oxygen tank No. 2 had blown up, disabling the normal supply of
oxygen, electricity, light, and water. Lovell reported to mission control:
“Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” and the crew scrambled to find out what
had happened. Several minutes later, Lovell looked out of the left-hand window
and saw that the spacecraft was venting a gas, which turned out to be the
Command Module’s (CM) oxygen. The landing mission was aborted.
As the CM lost pressure, its fuel cells also
died, and one hour after the explosion mission control instructed the crew to
move to the LM, which had sufficient oxygen, and use it as a lifeboat. The CM
was shut down but would have to be brought back on-line for Earth reentry. The
LM was designed to ferry astronauts from the orbiting CM to the moon’s surface
and back again; its power supply was meant to support two people for 45 hours.
If the crew of Apollo 13 were to make it back to Earth alive, the LM
would have to support three men for at least 90 hours and successfully navigate
more than 200,000 miles of space. The crew and mission control faced a
formidable task.
To complete its long journey, the LM needed
energy and cooling water. Both were to be conserved at the cost of the crew,
who went on one-fifth water rations and would later endure cabin temperatures
that hovered a few degrees above freezing. Removal of carbon dioxide was also a
problem, because the square lithium hydroxide canisters from the CM were not
compatible with the round openings in the LM environmental system. Mission
control built an impromptu adapter out of materials known to be onboard, and
the crew successfully copied their model.
Navigation was also a major problem. The LM
lacked a sophisticated navigational system, and the astronauts and mission
control had to work out by hand the changes in propulsion and direction needed
to take the spacecraft home. On April 14, Apollo 13 swung around the
moon. Swigert and Haise took pictures, and Lovell talked with mission control
about the most difficult maneuver, a five-minute engine burn that would give
the LM enough speed to return home before its energy ran out. Two hours after
rounding the far side of the moon, the crew, using the sun as an alignment
point, fired the LM’s small descent engine. The procedure was a success; Apollo
13 was on its way home.
For the next three days, Lovell, Haise, and
Swigert huddled in the freezing lunar module. Haise developed a case of the
flu. Mission control spent this time frantically trying to develop a procedure
that would allow the astronauts to restart the CM for reentry. On April 17, a
last-minute navigational correction was made, this time using Earth as an
alignment guide. Then the repressurized CM was successfully powered up after
its long, cold sleep. The heavily damaged service module was shed, and one hour
before re-entry the LM was disengaged from the CM. Just before 1 p.m., the
spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Mission control feared that the CM’s
heat shields were damaged in the accident, but after four minutes of radio
silence Apollo 13‘s parachutes were spotted, and the astronauts splashed
down safely into the Pacific Ocean.