Posted on 04/09/2010 12:31:12 PM PDT by chimera
Unlucky Apollo 13 was launched from KSC on April 11, 1970. Liftoff occurred at 2:13 pm EST, which, auspiciously, was 13:13 CST at MSC in Houston. For the superstitious among us, this in-your-face planning by NASA could only bode ill for the mission.
The remarkable journey of Apollo 13 has been documented in print and, most famously, the motion picture starring Tom Hanks. Since most of us know the overall story, we will focus here on the notable aspects and perhaps lesser-known but still interesting details.
The third manned lunar landing mission was targeted for the Fra Mauro feature, near the edge of Mare Cognitum. This region had been of interest to lunar geologists because it was thought to have ejecta materials from the Imbrium impact. It became more interesting because the seismometer left by the Apollo 12 landing in November 1969 had been detecting seismic activity that was thought to originate in the Fra Mauro region.
The original crew rotation had Apollo 13 scheduled for Alan Shepard’s crew. But, for the first time in NASA history, management vetoed the crew selection made by Astronaut Office Chief Deke Slayton. Since Shepard had not flown a mission in over nine years (and that being the suborbital hop in M.A. 1 [Freedom 7]), it was decided that Shepard’s crew needed more training time, so they were bumped to Apollo 14 (fortunately for them, as it turned out). The Hanks movie says the bump was a result of “Alan Shepard’s ear infection”, but it was not. Shepard had suffered from Meniere’s Disease but had corrective surgery for it prior to his return to active flight status.
Mission Commander James Lovell, a veteran of the historic Apollo 8 lunar orbit flight in December of 1968, was the first man scheduled to make a return trip to the moon. He was also a veteran of two Gemini missions, including the then-record 14-day flight of Gemini 7. At the time of the Apollo 13 flight, Jim Lovell had logged the most hours in space of any astronaut.
Lunar Module pilot Fred Haise was making his first space flight. He had trained extensively for exploration of the Fra Mauro highlands landing site and had earned the reputation among his fellow astronauts as being the most knowledgeable lunar module pilot. His familiarity with the LM systems would serve him well in the Apollo 13 flight.
The original Command Module Pilot was Thomas K. (Ken) Mattingly. Mattingly had not suffered from childhood measles, so incidental exposure to this contagion during flight training caused concern among the NASA medical staff as to his risk of contracting symptoms during the flight. Playing it safe, flight surgeons recommended scrubbing Mattingly from the crew and replacing him with backup CMP Jack Swigert. Lovell pleaded his case passionately with Chief Astronaut Slayton and other management and the chief flight surgeon, going so far as to argue that even if Mattingly fell ill, he could rest during the somewhat leisurely coast back to Earth after the lunar landing had been accomplished, that being the likely time he would experience symptoms. Slayton and the surgeons listened incredulously (but politely) to Lovell’s case, and thumbed Mattingly out of the lineup.
As it turned out, Ken Mattingly never did get sick from measles, so in hindsight it may appear that the flight surgeons made the wrong decision. But they did the right thing under the circumstances. They followed the rules. Crewmember illness is precisely why backup crews are trained and ready to step in. And, given how Apollo 13 turned out, where a crewmember actually did contract a somewhat debilitating illness (Fred Haise developed a urinary tract infection during the flight, caused by lack of water intake and a misunderstanding by the crew that they had to collect and store urine rather than dumping it), dealing with two ill crewmembers, if Mattingly did get the measles, would have made things that much more difficult.
Replacement CMP Jack Swigert flew in Mattingly’s place and made his first and only trip into space on Apollo 13. At the time, he was NASA’s only bachelor astronaut. The Apollo 13 movie makes special note of this in several scenes.
Because of the Fra Mauro landing site, shortly after the translunar injection a course correction was made to alter the trajectory of the spacecraft. Until then, like all Apollo missions, the spacecraft was following a “free return” flight path. If they did nothing else, the moon’s gravity would swing the spacecraft back to a return to the Earth’s atmosphere. The course change to accommodate the landing site removed Apollo 13 from this free return trajectory. The so-called “hybrid trajectory” would result in the spacecraft not re-entering the atmosphere, but instead consigned to a long, lonely extended orbit around the earth, with an apogee out beyond the moon. After the decision to abort the lunar landing, the first order of business was to return the spacecraft to a free return flight path.
The Apollo 13 service module was damaged by a cryosystem failure on April 13th (naturally) while the spacecraft was outbound from the Earth to the moon. Damaged wiring and insulation in the No. 2 oxygen tank ignited a fire within the tank when the “cryostir” fans were activated for a routine procedure. This caused an uncontrollable increase in tank pressure. It is a common misconception that the oxygen tank “exploded”. A review board concluded that the most likely failure point was in the conduits leading from the tank, and that the tank itself did not explode. The sudden release of oxygen gas caused the “bay” in the Service Module to be pressurized beyond the limits it could contain. The panel covering the bay was blown off, which caused the “bang” heard by the crew and rocking motion of the spacecraft (the SM cover was deliberately jettisoned in Apollos 15-17 to uncover scientific observation instruments, which caused a “whump” sound and rocking motion similar to that reported by Apollo 13). Secondary damage occurred to other conduits leading to the eventual loss of another oxygen tank, and all fuel cells. The crew had to power down the spacecraft and use the LM systems to make the return journey. The movie “Apollo 13” covers this well.
Not many know that it was a faulty sensor in the cryosystem that led to the call from Mission Control to request the tank stir which caused the explosion. A quantity sensor had been reading off scale high, which led controllers to ask for repeated cryostirs to validate their readings. The stir that caused the damage on the outward leg of the trip normally would have taken place sometime during the return to Earth, after the LM had been used. The crew likely would not have survived if the LM were not available. So in a way it was “fortunate” that the accident happened when it did. If the accident had occurred in lunar orbit with the LM at the Fra Mauro landing site the result would have been particularly ghoulish, with two healthy astronauts stranded on the lunar surface while to Command Module and its pilot died overhead.
As a result of the Apollo 13 mishap, changes were made in Service Module systems. These included physical separation of cryogenic conduits to avoid common-mode failure, the addition of a third oxygen tank and emergency battery physically separated from the primary tanks. The extra consumables tank (oxygen, hydrogen, water) was already planned to support the longer-duration “J” missions (Apollo 15 and afterward), but implementation was accelerated. The added weight, plus planned use of the lunar rover in the “J” missions, required uprating of the Saturn V first stage engines, from 7.5 to 7.6 million pounds of thrust. Emergency procedures were also updated, including a 30-minute LM power-up procedure.
Of all the various challenges faced by the crew, the final indignity arose just before re-entry. There was a plutonium-powered instrument aboard the LM that was supposed to be left on the lunar surface. But the emergency return meant that the LM would re-enter the atmosphere. The plutonium-powered RTG was designed to survive re-entry, but nervous officials of the then-regulatory authority, the SEC, or Atomic Energy Commission, wanted to avoid the RTG capsule coming down on land, where it might be misused or otherwise cause harm if found. So they had the crew perform one final maneuver that steered the LM to a burnup over the South Pacific Ocean, where the RTG capsule presumably rests today.
The Apollo 13 command module safely landed on April 17, ending a remarkable 6-day mission which has been called a “successful failure”. The prime objective of the landing at Fra Mauro was not achieved, but the crew returned safely, which is always a mission objective. The one other success, which not many remember, was the successful impact of the S-IVB stage on the lunar surface. Until then, the expended stage was directed into a heliocentric orbit (although there is evidence that the S-IVB stage from Apollo 12 has been re-captured by Earth’s gravity). Starting with Apollo 13, the used stages were pressed into service as projectiles to caused “artificial moonquakes” that could test the seismometers left by landing missions. Here is a picture of the impact crater left by the Apollo 14 S-IVB stage:
The performance of the crew of Apollo 13, the controllers at MOCR, and their various support staffs, was exemplary. They performed their jobs with unbelievable calmness under pressure unlike any before. Flight Director Gene Kranz is credited with the line “Failure is not an option.” In the movie about Apollo 13, but he never in fact used those words at the time. The movie scriptwriters interviewed Jerry Bostik, who was the Flight Dynamics Officer (controller) for Apollo 13. Here is his recollection:
As far as the expression 'Failure is not an option", you are correct that Kranz never used that term. In preparation for the movie, the script writers, Al Reinart and Bill Broyles, came down to Clear Lake to interview me on "What are the people in Mission Control really like?" One of their questions was "Weren't there times when everybody, or at least a few people, just panicked?" My answer was "No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution." I immediately sensed that Bill Broyles wanted to leave and assumed that he was bored with the interview. Only months later did I learn that when they got in their car to leave, he started screaming, "That's it! That's the tag line for the whole movie, Failure is not an option. Now we just have to figure out who to have say it." Of course, they gave it to the Kranz character, and the rest is history.
So, a little artistic embellishment of the actual history, but perfectly understandable. The flight crew of Apollo 13 has been called “the best ever”, and if so they certainly earned that accolade by their performance. Everyone who flies in space exhibits uncommon bravery, but these men are of an elite pantheon of spacefarers who faced challenges and conditions unlike any others. The names of Lovell, Haise, and Swigert must be uttered when reciting those of Gagarin, Leonov, Borman, Anders, Armstrong, and Aldrin, men who faced the unknown and potentially grave circumstances and obstacles, but carried through their mission with consummate professionalism, courage, and devotion to duty. Here is a picture after their return to Earth:
LM pilot Haise, pictured at the left, is obvious haggard-looking from the ordeal as well as still suffering from a urinary tract infection, which took several weeks of recovery time after the crew’s return.
Mission Commander James A. Lovell Jr. is a native of Cleveland, and grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is a retired Navy captain and graduate of Annapolis (class of 1952). Assigned to flight school, Lovell was a Navy fighter pilot in the Korean War, and later a Navy test pilot at the test center in Maryland, where many astronauts served. He flew in space as Frank Borman’s co-pilot on Gemini 7, spending 14 days in orbit, and later commanded Gemini 12, with Buzz Aldrin, later of Apollo 11 fame, as his co-pilot. Lovell was a member of the famous crew that orbited the moon on Apollo 8, one of the three men who first truly left the planet Earth for another world (escaping the Earth’s gravity). Captain Lovell has a cameo appearance in the movie “Apollo 13”, as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the ship that led the recovery force for the Apollo 13 splashdown. He can be seen as the naval officer shaking Tom Hanks' hand, as Hanks speaks invoice-over in the scene in which the astronauts come aboard the Iwo Jima. The movie’s producers offered to make Lovell's character an admiral aboard the ship, but Lovell stated "I retired as a captain and a captain I will be", and he was so cast as the ship's skipper, who was Captain Leland E. Kirkemo in actual fact. Jim Lovell left NASA in 1973, and worked in business as well as giving speeches to students and service organizations. The Lovell family still lives in Texas.
LM pilot Fred Haise is from Biloxi, MS and a graduate of the University of Oklahoma. He is also a graduate of the USAF test pilot school at Edwards AFB, and became a US Marine Corps fighter pilot. He was to be Commander of Apollo 19, but the mission was cancelled because of spending cuts. Haise trained for the space shuttle program but because of long delays in the shuttle’s development, he never flew in space again. After leaving NASA in 1979, he joined Grumman Aerospace Corp. in Bethpage, NY.
CM Pilot Jack Swigert was a native of Denver. He graduated from the University of Colorado and earned graduate degrees from RPI and the University of Hartford. Swigert joined the US Air Force and was a fighter pilot in Korea and Japan. He was also a test pilot for Pratt and Whitney, and North American Aviation. After Apollo 13, Swigert was considered for a spot as CM on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, but he was caught up in the Apollo 15 postage stamp scandal. While not directly involved, Swigert was less than forthcoming when questioned about the practice of carrying souvenirs aboard spacecraft for the purpose of later resale. This practice was not illegal nor prohibited by NASA policy at the time, but “unauthorized” transport of such items was viewed with disfavor. The incident with Apollo 15 caused NASA embarrassment with Congress at a time when major cuts in funding for space exploration were being considered. This ended Swigert’s NASA career. Swigert began a career in politics and he won a Congressional seat in Colorado’s newly created 6th district in the 1982 election. He was a very popular candidate, receiving 62.2% of the vote to his Democratic opponent’s 35.6%. Tragically, Jack Swigert died of bone cancer in late December, 1982, not living long enough to serve even a single day in the office to which he was elected.
Apollo 13 stands today as a monument to courage and ingenuity under extraordinary conditions. Please take a moment to honor these men in your hearts for their bravery, 40 years ago this month.
i never thought in my wildest dreams I would be sitting in my living room with a tiny computer in my lap.
Ken Mattingly went on to command two Shuttle flights, including the last “test” flight in 1982. There is a picture that shows up on FR every so often of a shuttle crew saluting President Reagan, with Reagan wearing a pinkish suit — Mattingly is the commander saluting in those pictures.
John Young is another former moonwalker that became a shuttle jockey, along with Mattingly. Haise did the atmospheric glide tests but I don't think ever went into orbit again. Any others? I can't think of any offhand. Joe Engle trained for Apollo missions but never flew in that program. I guess he'd be another.
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