Apollo 13: 1. Time bomb

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Speaker 6 Friday, April 17th, 1970. This is the closing act of the mission of Apollo 13.
NASA's aborted expedition to the moon. Four days ago, their spacecraft was crippled by an explosion.

Speaker 6 Since then, Mission Control has battled round the clock just to keep the crew alive. Across the globe, millions of radios and television sets are tuned in to witness the astronauts' fate.

Speaker 6 The world is watching, waiting.

Speaker 7 We're now coming to the moment, the last moments of Apollo 13 as it comes in, as it begins its re-entry. The best thing we can do now is just to listen and hope.

Speaker 7 The last few seconds down to re-entry.

Speaker 7 At this point there's very little anybody can do including the astronauts except wait as they come in through the uppermost fringes of the Earth's atmosphere.

Speaker 10 You're coming back from the moon at 35,000 feet per second.

Speaker 10 That is haul on the mail

Speaker 8 and you've got to do it just right.

Speaker 7 The computers put them on course. All anybody can do now is cross their fingers.

Speaker 6 NASA has never known anything like it. An explosion hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth, a spacecraft leaking oxygen and losing power, a crew freezing in the darkness at risk of suffocation.

Speaker 6 This is the final moment of truth. Everything now hangs on the capsule's heat shield and the hope that it can protect them from the fire of re-entry.

Speaker 7 Apollo Control Houston, we've just had loss of signal from honeysuckle.

Speaker 7 And they've lost them on the main radio contact antenna in Australia at Honeysuckle Creek.

Speaker 6 Sleep deprived and at the end of their tether, astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Hayes and Jack Swigert are caged inside their capsule, hurtling through the scorching atmosphere, watching the flicker of inferno through their windows.

Speaker 6 The fierce heat of re-entry charges the air around them, creating a wall through which radio signals cannot pass.

Speaker 7 Just about now, they should be going through the moment of maximum heat.

Speaker 7 And we'll only know whether or not that heat shield was damaged by the explosion three days ago. When they come out of radio blackout, in just over two minutes.

Speaker 6 It's a miracle they've made it even this far. And still, nobody knows if they'll survive.
Everyone holds their breath. None more so than the astronauts' families.

Speaker 9 Everyone was there to watch the landing with me, and I was surrounded by my children.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 it was so quiet. It was so tense.

Speaker 9 Very tense.

Speaker 7 Less than ten seconds now, we will attempt to contact Apollo 13 through one of the Oriah aircraft, continuing to monitor this Apollo-controlled Houston.

Speaker 13 Okay, CB.

Speaker 1 TV coming out of blackout now. Messenger.

Speaker 1 Can you see him?

Speaker 1 Basically.

Speaker 13 Negative.

Speaker 6 There is no contact, no sign of the crew or their capsule. And in mission control, only anxiety.

Speaker 14 That never happened to us before.

Speaker 14 That the blackout didn't end when it was supposed to. That was when we came to this period where you could have heard a pin drop.

Speaker 15 Network, any reports of RIA acquisition yet? Not at the staff site.

Speaker 16 Okay.

Speaker 10 No answer. Did it burn up? Are we okay?

Speaker 8 We did everything we could, I think.

Speaker 11 What could we have missed?

Speaker 14 There wasn't anything we could do about it.

Speaker 17 Zip.

Speaker 14 Zero.

Speaker 15 Network, no RIA contact yet? Not at a staff site. Okay.

Speaker 6 From the BBC World Service, this is 13 Minutes to the Moon, Season 2.

Speaker 6 I'm Kevin Fong, and this is the incredible story of the flight of Apollo 13.

Speaker 6 Okay, Helen, we've had a problem here. We've got more than a problem.

Speaker 12 We lost O2 tank two pressure.

Speaker 13 That can't be.

Speaker 16 Let's make sure we don't blow the whole mission.

Speaker 13 And why the whole side of that thing misses?

Speaker 15 That's the end right there.

Speaker 6 Episode 1. Time Bomb.

Speaker 18 This is Apollo Saturn Launch Control. We're just passing the one-hour mark in our countdown.
Now in the final hour of the countdown toward the launch of Apollo 13.

Speaker 6 The closeout of the United States. Apollo 13 was NASA's third bid to land people on the moon.

Speaker 6 It came just nine months after the triumph of Apollo 11, which saw Neil Armstrong's famous small step win the space race, leaving the United States victorious over the Soviet Union.

Speaker 6 Apollo 12 followed suit, executing its lunar landing with pinpoint accuracy. So by the time of Apollo 13, NASA appeared to have found its rhythm.

Speaker 6 And to the public, a feat that had appeared impossible less than a year earlier now began to seem routine. But Apollo 13 was fatally flawed from the start.
It would never land on the Moon.

Speaker 6 Instead, an explosion triggered a catastrophic cascade of events that threatened the spacecraft and the lives of the crew over and over again throughout their mission.

Speaker 6 For this season, I've talked to the two astronauts of Apollo 13 who are alive today and a cast of characters who supported them from the ground to understand not just what happened, but how it happened.

Speaker 6 This is James Lovell, commander of Apollo 13.

Speaker 17 You have to look at this flight. It's a tale of two groups.
One group in a comfortable control room fortified by hot coffee and cigarettes that had to make quick and correct decisions.

Speaker 17 The other group in a cold, damp, crippled spacecraft 200,000 miles from Earth who had to make sure that what they said was number one going to work and number two are we going to put it in correctly and control the spacecraft to do the job.

Speaker 6 Jim Lovell was selected as an astronaut in 1962 against fierce competition.

Speaker 6 He'd flown fighter jets for the US Navy, mastering the precarious art of landing on an aircraft carrier at night in rolling seas.

Speaker 6 And as if that were not hazard enough, he later became a Navy test pilot, taking new and experimental vehicles into the air.

Speaker 6 But at heart he was an explorer, and for him there could be no greater prize than the chance to walk on the moon.

Speaker 17 This was what I I thought I was born to do. I mean exploration, this is a new territory.
We understood the risk

Speaker 17 but this was where you trade off risk for reward.

Speaker 17 This certainly was at least to me the reason why I was at NASA in the first place.

Speaker 6 To Jim Lovell the spacecraft were ships sailing on a new ocean. And when the time came to name his Apollo 13 command module, he chose something to reflect his ambitions, Odyssey.

Speaker 17 I thought that Odyssey

Speaker 17 was very appropriate. A long voyage with many chances of misfortune.

Speaker 6 And in keeping with the spirit of exploration, the mission had a motto.

Speaker 17 Ex-Luna Scientia.

Speaker 17 How more appropriate could you put on a patch a motto going to the moon looking for an adventure than Ex Luna Scientia, looking at the moon for science.

Speaker 6 Apollo 13 was the first of the lunar missions for which science was the true focus.

Speaker 6 Headed for a heavily cratered area called Frau Moro, it was an opportunity for real geological study that would help unravel the mystery of the moon's origins.

Speaker 6 Amongst the astronauts, Lovell was already a seasoned veteran. This would be his fourth mission in space, but it would also be his only opportunity to set foot on the surface of the moon.

Speaker 6 He'd decided that Apollo 13 would be his last spaceflight. Lovell was already well regarded amongst his peers.
He'd flown twice in Earth orbit aboard the earlier Gemini missions.

Speaker 6 But it was his pioneering role as pilot in the crew of Apollo 8, the first mission to escape the Earth's clutches and orbit the Moon, that earned everyone's deep respect.

Speaker 10 That crew on Apollo 8 were brave, I'll tell you.

Speaker 6 Here's astronaut Charlie Duke, a member of Apollo 13's backup crew.

Speaker 10 That was a big deal flying Apollo 8 to the moon. First time they'd ever been, anybody had ever been on the Saturn.
And once they left Earth orbit, they were on their own. Everything had to work.

Speaker 10 And it was a second flight on the Apollo command module. So it was gutsy.

Speaker 6 Was Jim Lovell the ideal person to be in command of the mission Apollo 13?

Speaker 10 Turned out, I believe he was, because he was real laid back and real cool. He wasn't really, didn't get nervous.

Speaker 10 He He had a nickname Shaky, but I don't remember why that was because he wasn't that way in training.

Speaker 6 Preparations for launch were well underway. Jim Lovell's prime crew was completed by two rookie astronauts, Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly and Lunar Module Pilot Fred Hayes.

Speaker 6 Neither had yet flown in space, but Hayes was more than eager to go.

Speaker 1 Bills, as you're getting closer and closer, and you're looking at the booster at night lit up, you're doing some of the late bench checks of things that you know it's for real.

Speaker 1 Now, I'd gone through this twice before as a backup.

Speaker 1 And mentally, what you do as a backup, you train equally to the prime, all the same work, you're ready to go.

Speaker 1 You kind of back away from being that excited because you realize within a month, you're probably not going to get to go fly.

Speaker 1 But in the case of one of Apollo 13, it was the first time it was, I hoped, at least, my opportunity to really go fly. So it was a beating of the drums kind of buildup.

Speaker 6 Hayes and his fellow astronauts were amongst the most highly skilled, highly trained people anywhere in the world. But spaceflight is a complex endeavor.

Speaker 6 and much of the mission was beyond their control. Their safety and security was woven into the fabric of their technology and vehicles.

Speaker 6 The Apollo spacecraft represented the state of the art in science and engineering and the distillation of the labor of 400,000 individuals.

Speaker 6 So much of it was mission critical, so much of it had to work perfectly. But within Apollo 13 lay a hidden flaw.

Speaker 6 18 months earlier, before the mission had even been decided upon, technicians had fumbled one of the oxygen tanks on the spacecraft's assembly line.

Speaker 6 It fell from a height of just two inches, but that was enough.

Speaker 6 The tanks were spherical shells made of titanium, about the diameter of a bicycle wheel. They were built to hold liquid oxygen at super cold temperatures.

Speaker 6 Inside, there were fans and heaters to stir the liquid oxygen and keep it at the right pressure.

Speaker 6 But the damage caused by the drop was like a single falling domino, leading to a cascade of further complications.

Speaker 6 During testing on the ground, while attempting to fill and empty the tank, there were problems.

Speaker 6 The engineers ran the heaters within for far too long, and the elements inside were allowed to become way too hot.

Speaker 6 And because of this, the Teflon insulation surrounding wires connected to the fans melted.

Speaker 6 But none of this was detected, and the damaged tank was installed in the Apollo 13 spacecraft.

Speaker 6 The stage was now set. Bare wires waiting to spark lay buried in the heart of Odyssey's oxygen supply.
To ignite catastrophe, it would take just the flick of a single switch.

Speaker 6 This wasn't a mission for the superstitious. This was Apollo 13 due to launch at 13 minutes past one in the afternoon, or on a 24-hour clock, 13:13.

Speaker 6 And the crew were scheduled to begin their approach to the moon on April the 13th.

Speaker 6 Superstition aside, in the days before launch, Jim Lovell recalls that his crew suffered a run of bad luck, starting with health problems affecting both the prime and backup crews.

Speaker 17 Well, it was one of a series of things that occurred on that occurred on Apollo 13. Many people think it's a sort of a bad number to be involved with, and I kind of think they're right.
Anyway,

Speaker 17 the backup crew member, Charlie Duke, was exposed to the measles.

Speaker 17 In fact, I think he got the measles. But anyway, the prime crew member, including all three of us, plus the other backup people, were exposed to the measles.

Speaker 6 And illness amongst astronauts that threatened the latest lunar mission just a week before launch was a story for CBS television news. Dr.

Speaker 12 Charles Berry, Director of Medical Operations, said today all three Apollo 13 astronauts were exposed yesterday to German measles.

Speaker 12 Berry said the crew, James Lovell, Thomas Mattingly, and Fred Hayes, are now in good physical condition, but the results of tests for German measles will not be known until Wednesday.

Speaker 12 Those results could postpone the launching scheduled for Saturday.

Speaker 6 It was an uneasy few days for Fred Hayes.

Speaker 1 So they were taking blood from us pretty much every day, I think,

Speaker 1 and shipping him off to

Speaker 1 some expert looking at our blood for the antibodies and whatever. And of course,

Speaker 1 that added a lot of tension that week that normally there wouldn't have been.

Speaker 6 CBS picked up the story again.

Speaker 12 Blood tests indicate two members of the Prime crew, Lovell and Hayes, have adequate immunity. But Ken Mattingly seems to have no resistance resistance to the disease at all.

Speaker 12 The only way doctors could guarantee that he will not get sick during the flight would be if he got sick before and recovered.

Speaker 6 On the recommendation of its medical team, NASA decided that Ken Mattingly wouldn't fly. It was a difficult decision to make.
Nobody could be sure if Mattingly would fall ill.

Speaker 6 But German measles is a serious disease, bad enough to hospitalize or kill a patient, and certainly bad enough to stop an astronaut being an effective crew member.

Speaker 6 It was the right decision, but it it was a blow to the crew's morale.

Speaker 1 And of course just the huge, enormous disappointment roughly two and a half days before launch when the decision was made to change out one crewman Jack Schweiger to replace Ken Manningly,

Speaker 1 which obviously was extremely emotional with Ken because he had done that build-up getting ready to go and now had it yanked away.

Speaker 6 So emotionally it was quite a blow, but operationally you weren't worried about that substitution.

Speaker 1 No, no, I always felt as a backup, I could fly it just as good, if not better, than the person who flew.

Speaker 1 We did go through some training rather late approaching launch, and as it turned out with this crew changeout, we were in simulators into the evening before launch, the next morning.

Speaker 6 Jim Lovell reluctantly accepted the replacement of Ken Mattingly, but he was more than happy that his backup, Jack Swigert, was up to the job.

Speaker 17 Jack was fine because he had done a lot of the work in the malfunction procedures, and so in reality, he was a perfect guy to change out.

Speaker 17 But that was sort of a bad omen.

Speaker 17 There were several bad omens in that flight.

Speaker 6 Some teams come together at the last moment. Some are made for life.

Speaker 6 And few can be said to be stronger than the partnership between Jim and his wife, Marilyn.

Speaker 6 How did you and Jim meet in the first place?

Speaker 19 We met in high school.

Speaker 9 That was back in the early 40s.

Speaker 9 He was a junior and I was

Speaker 9 a freshman. He was two years ahead of me.
And

Speaker 9 believe it or not, he was working in the cafeteria.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 I guess we started talking as I went through the line. And before I know it, I was working in the cafeteria myself.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 9 we started dating.

Speaker 19 Oh I know

Speaker 9 he took me to his junior prom

Speaker 9 and we've been together ever since.

Speaker 6 By the time of Apollo 13 Marilyn and Jim had four children and they'd been living in the suburbs of Houston since the early days of the space program.

Speaker 6 And I wondered if his astronaut adventures had just become part of normal family life.

Speaker 9 It was never routine. He had been on three flights and I wasn't really looking forward to it because he was so busy down at the Cape and he wasn't home very much for the family.

Speaker 9 I think I was apprehensive.

Speaker 6 But leading up to this flight, were you more apprehensive than usual?

Speaker 9 Yes, I would say so.

Speaker 19 One of the reasons. I'm superstitious, I think.

Speaker 9 Apollo 13 just didn't agree with me.

Speaker 18 We're now approaching the T-1 minute mark, T-minus one minute and counting.

Speaker 6 Friday, April 11th, 1970. The morning of launch.
Swing arm number one will retract.

Speaker 6 Jim Lovell and his crew were now strapped into their command module, perched on top of the towering Saturn V rocket, the most powerful launcher in the history of spaceflight.

Speaker 6 Third stage and the instrument unit going to internal power. Marilyn put her misgivings aside and took her young family to Cape Kennedy in Florida to watch Jim blast off on his Odyssey to the moon.

Speaker 6 The launches never failed to impress.

Speaker 9 Well, it was a wonderful experience.

Speaker 9 NASA allowed my children and myself to go out to a mound of sand about three miles from the launch pad itself.

Speaker 9 And it was a perfect place. I think they said we were closest as anyone could be.

Speaker 9 And the Earth just shook.

Speaker 20 Two, one,

Speaker 20 zero. We have commit and we have liftoff at 2.13.

Speaker 20 The Saturn V building up to 7.6 million pounds of thrust and it has clear the tower.

Speaker 6 Shea, the Lovell's eldest son, was awestruck by the experience.

Speaker 11 Did you ever hear of Saturn V

Speaker 11 I mean, you say it light up, you see the smoke, but they don't tell you about the crackling noise that comes three seconds later and the ground shakes.

Speaker 11 Then the heat wave.

Speaker 11 You know, that's a Saturn V with seven million pounds of thrust.

Speaker 12 13 use and go at 30 seconds.

Speaker 17 That

Speaker 11 is amazing. We're all complete and we're pitching.

Speaker 15 Grouch you that, stand by for mode one fravo.

Speaker 6 his seat shuddering with the force of the launch Fred Hayes is enjoying his first taste of spaceflight

Speaker 1 It was a very Herky jerky ride I'll say compared to anything I experienced in airplanes. That was probably the biggest difference those big engines gave you a lot of jerking around

Speaker 1 Which was I'm sure exaggerated because you're way way up on the tippy top of this large rocket 13 Houston go at one.

Speaker 12 We show the cabin relieving

Speaker 17 Roger Well, it was old hat for me. I mean, relatively speaking, I know what to expect.

Speaker 17 The things worked perfectly.

Speaker 17 The booster, the Saturn V, did its job. Everything was really fine.

Speaker 6 Over the airways, the voice of NASA's public announcer, carried by television and radio broadcast, keeps track of the launch.

Speaker 12 And at one minute 10 seconds, we show an altitude of 4.1 nautical miles.

Speaker 15 Downrange, one mile.

Speaker 12 13 Houston, standby for Mode 1 Charlie.

Speaker 15 Mark, you're 1 Charlie.

Speaker 12 Mark, 1 Charlie.

Speaker 6 The first stage of the rocket is nearly spent. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel have been burned, and it is now no more than a dead weight to be discarded.

Speaker 12 And 13, you're go for staging.

Speaker 15 Go for staging, Roger. We're EDS, manual.

Speaker 12 Altitude now 17 miles coming up on staging.

Speaker 6 But then, malfunction.

Speaker 6 One of the engines unexpectedly shuts down two minutes early, threatening the launch and leading to this exchange between the flight controllers monitoring the launch in mission control.

Speaker 7 Flight booster then board out was late early. Okay.

Speaker 7 Flight confirmed, uh, number five engine down.

Speaker 17 Right. There's another sign of his Apollo 13 a bad number.

Speaker 17 Of course, at first we saw the problem. The light came on and we called and said, you know, we've lost an engine and they agreed to it.

Speaker 11 Houston, what's the story on engine 5?

Speaker 15 Jim Houston, we don't have a story on why the inboard out was early, but the other engines are go and you're go.

Speaker 15 Alright?

Speaker 17 So that worked out. But, you know,

Speaker 17 another anomaly, which,

Speaker 17 you know, we thought we got over that. I mean, in fact, I looked at the guys, I said, you know what, in every flight, there's something that goes wrong.
This time, this engine went out.

Speaker 17 But by gosh, we had enough fuel to get in Earth orbit and we could go all the way to the moon so hey let's sit back and relax and enjoy this.

Speaker 6 Two hours and 40 minutes after the launch the crew are safely in orbit around the Earth. and preparing to fire their engine once more, this time to send the spacecraft on its way to the moon.

Speaker 6 Here you can just about hear Jim Lovell confirm the moment of ignition.

Speaker 15 Jim Lovell reports we have ignition.

Speaker 6 The engine springs to life again, accelerating Apollo 13 to 25,000 miles per hour, breaking the bond with Earth. After five minutes, it shuts down, right on schedule.

Speaker 6 And now for a little anatomy lesson. To get to the Moon, the Saturn V had to lift two vehicles into space, the Command and Service Module, or CSM, and the Lunar Module, better known as the LEM.

Speaker 6 The Lunar Module, named Aquarius, was only designed to be flown by two astronauts and only for a short trip from lunar orbit down to the surface.

Speaker 6 It was built to be light, with little in the way of creature comforts. It had no seats and was cramped and fragile.

Speaker 6 The Command and Service Module was itself divided into two separate compartments, the conical command module in which the crew lived and the cylindrical service module which held the engine, supplies of fuel, oxygen and the means of generating electrical power.

Speaker 6 In comparison to the spider-like lunar module, the command module Odyssey was built like a tank.

Speaker 6 Robust and powerful, sturdy enough to endure the violence of re-entry, the command module was the vehicle from which the crew controlled the mission.

Speaker 6 They depended on it for shelter as they crossed the quarter of a million miles of space between the Earth and the Moon.

Speaker 6 On the voyage to the Moon, the command and lunar module would dock to one another, nose to nose, and the crew could float back and forth between the two.

Speaker 6 Apollo 13 is safely set to coast for three days, and for the first time, there's a chance to sit back, enjoy the ride, and take some photographs of home.

Speaker 6 Looks like a picture ticket time again.

Speaker 11 Apollo 13 Houston.

Speaker 11 Uh go ahead man.

Speaker 6 Fred Hayes is on the radio to fellow astronaut Vance Brand, the capsule communicator or Capcom for this shift. The Capcom is a key position in mission control.

Speaker 6 Under normal circumstances, they're the only person allowed to talk to the crew during the mission.

Speaker 15 Okay, Earth should be coming into view.

Speaker 11 Earth's starting to look pretty small now.

Speaker 11 Well, uh,

Speaker 11 looking at it here, Vance, uh

Speaker 11 it's hard to be convinced it's even the Earth now, let's see as uh water and clouds.

Speaker 11 Are you still there, Ven?

Speaker 11 Right, go ahead.

Speaker 11 I guess the world really does uh turn. I can see some of my land masses now.

Speaker 11 It must be Australia down there at the bottom and

Speaker 11 part of Asia, China, probably.

Speaker 11 Hey, maybe

Speaker 16 the fact that you verified that the Earth really turns, we can call this Hayes' theory, huh?

Speaker 16 Very good, Vance. Very good.

Speaker 16 Vance,

Speaker 16 from our calculations, we've we've taken about ten thirds of the photography pictures.

Speaker 16 I was thinking about uh

Speaker 16 getting uh squared away to bed down for the evening pretty soon.

Speaker 16 Okay,

Speaker 6 the crew even has time to queue up some in-flight entertainment.

Speaker 6 Good lord.

Speaker 6 Two uneventful days pass.

Speaker 6 In the mission control room, four separate teams of flight controllers have worked round the clock, checking that everything on the spacecraft is working and that the mission is on course.

Speaker 6 There have been a few glitches, but nothing serious.

Speaker 6 One of the controllers now on duty is Cy Liebergot.

Speaker 6 In mission control, his call sign is ECOM. He's in charge of monitoring the command and service module's electrical power and its life support systems.
Apollo 13's oxygen tanks are his responsibility.

Speaker 6 Cy Liebergott is sitting at his console. He monitors the numbers flickering away on his screen, tracking the information from a network of sensors on board the spacecraft.
Everything looks fine.

Speaker 22 I was nearing the last hour of my eight-hour shift. We had three shifts a day, each eight hours long,

Speaker 22 and

Speaker 22 it was very routine. I mean, after all, this is the third time we're going to go land on the moon.

Speaker 6 With Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert keeping watch in Odyssey, Apollo 13 is now nearly 200,000 miles from Earth.

Speaker 6 Fred Hayes and Jim Lovell, video camera in hand, begin something that had become a tradition on lunar missions. A live TV broadcast with Capcom Jack Lausmer joining in over the radio from the ground.

Speaker 18 Okay, 13, we got Fred on TV.

Speaker 18 Roger Houston,

Speaker 18 all we plan to do for you today is turn out in the

Speaker 18 spaceship for Odyssey and take you on through from Odyssey into the tunnel into Aquarius and show you a little bit of

Speaker 18 the landing vehicle. And

Speaker 17 Hayes and I were in the lunar module and we were doing a routine

Speaker 17 broadcast down to the control center which was automatically putting it out to the network. And we were doing what people had done before and done after.

Speaker 17 We're discussing the switches and we're looking outside and showing them what the earth looked like out that far and all that.

Speaker 17 Immediately uh adjacent to uh the uh engine cover here I have my hand on a white box now.

Speaker 17 Uh

Speaker 17 this uh happens to be a jam's uh backpack which will uh supply oxygen and uh water for cooling while on the lunar surface.

Speaker 6 It's a great performance. But no TV networks are carrying the show.
And neither are there any reporters watching in Mission Control's viewing room. Just the crew's wives and their children.

Speaker 22 There was nobody there from the news media because, after all, we is old hat now

Speaker 22 in their minds. And there was nobody from the news media there.

Speaker 22 And Jim Lovell, the commander, didn't know that. He thought it was going to be a normal thing when they give their

Speaker 22 little tour of the lunar module, but he didn't realize that they had lost interest.

Speaker 22 We might give you a quick shot of our entertainment on board the spacecraft, which has been keeping this company for some time.

Speaker 6 In 1970, the state-of-the-art in entertainment systems was a humble tape recorder.

Speaker 6 This little tape recorder has been

Speaker 6 a big benefit to us in

Speaker 6 passing through the tapaway and our transit out to the boat.

Speaker 6 Okay, Jim,

Speaker 12 it's been a real good TV show.

Speaker 12 We think we ought to conclude it from here now. What do you think?

Speaker 12 Roger sounds good, and this is the crew of Apollo 13.

Speaker 13 Wishing everybody there a

Speaker 13 nice evening, and we're just probably to close out our inspection of Athenius and get back for a pleasant evening at Odyssey.

Speaker 15 Thank you, 13.

Speaker 6 In mission control, sitting next to the Capcom, is Gene Krantz, the flight director for this shift.

Speaker 6 He leads the mission control team, gathering and filtering information from his flight controllers, using that to make critical decisions.

Speaker 6 If you heard the first season of 13 Minutes to the Moon, you'll know him well as the no-nonsense chain-smoking former Marine and lead flight director for the historic landing of Apollo 11.

Speaker 6 Everyone is relaxed. The mission is well on track and going to plan, but all of that is about to change.

Speaker 5 After the television broadcast was concluded, the Wisen families had been behind me in the viewing room and as they left we sort of waved adios and they went off.

Speaker 5 They turned the lights out in the viewing room behind me and the final thing we had to do was to get the crew to sleep.

Speaker 6 Gene Krantz, in his interview with the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.

Speaker 5 And we have a pre-sleep checklist we go through. It's about five pages in length.
And we're down to the final item in the checklist. We're getting ready to close it out.

Speaker 5 Now, earlier in the shift, we had had an

Speaker 5 anomaly associated with a tank pressure.

Speaker 6 At this point, the glitch isn't a major concern, but it's something that Ecom Cy Liebergott wants to troubleshoot before the end of his shift.

Speaker 22 We had lost a

Speaker 22 quantity sensor on oxygen tank, quarter tank oxygen tank number two,

Speaker 22 early in the mission, about 47 hours into the mission. And it's no big deal.
And then, being a good engineer, I decided, you know,

Speaker 22 I don't want to wait until the morning. Why don't I just go see if the oxygen tanks are behaving properly before they go to sleep?

Speaker 6 Liebergott asks for the crew to switch on the fans in the tanks of liquid oxygen, hoping to nudge the system into life and help him understand the problem.

Speaker 5 Flight Director Gene Krantz explains: It's a super dense, super cold liquid at launch at temperatures of minus 300 to minus minus 400 degrees packed in vacuum tanks.

Speaker 5 But by the time you're two days into the mission, you've used some of these resources, and these consumables have turned into a very thick, soupy fog or a vapor in the tank.

Speaker 5 And like fog on Earth, it tends to stratify or develop in layers.

Speaker 5 So inside the tanks, we have some fans we turn on to stir up this mixture.

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 5 make it uniform so we can measure it. And then we use some heaters to raise the pressure for the sleep period.

Speaker 5 Well, we had asked the crew to do this. We advised the crew that we wanted a cryo stir.

Speaker 18 13, we've got one more item for you when you get a chance.

Speaker 15 We'd like you to stir up your cryo tanks.

Speaker 5 Jack Swigert acknowledged our request. Okay.

Speaker 6 Stand by. Swigert's finger is now on the switch connected to the fans in the tank that was dropped and damaged 18 months ago.

Speaker 6 The tank with the bare electrical wires sitting in a reservoir of pure oxygen.

Speaker 5 Sai Liebergat at this time, who is my ecom, had the responsibilities for the cryo systems,

Speaker 5 had now switched his attention to the current measurements that he had, the electric current measurements, and Swigert started the cryo stir.

Speaker 6 This is Liebergat checking with one of his backroom support engineers that the data is coming in.

Speaker 5 Liebergat saw the currents increase, indicating the stir had started.

Speaker 5 All of a sudden.

Speaker 17 We had just finished the broadcast. Hayes was still in the spacecraft.
I was taking the camera back down to the command module when suddenly there was

Speaker 17 a big bang.

Speaker 17 It rocked everything. I mean, you know, the whole panel coming off from the service module then went through to the command module and everything rocked.

Speaker 17 I was partway through the tunnel when I looked up I looked up at Fred Hayes

Speaker 17 You know, I'm saying what's going on here, you know, and I looked at Hayes and he had no idea what was going on Then I looked at Swikert

Speaker 17 Swikert's eyes were as wide as saucers

Speaker 6 Swigert had closed the circuit current had flowed in the bare wires and sparked across With a source of ignition and a fog of pure oxygen, the remaining Teflon insulation became fuel to the fire, burning ferociously, vaporizing the liquid.

Speaker 6 The pressure within the tank spiked rapidly until even the titanium shell could no longer contain it.

Speaker 6 It ruptured, filling the surrounding compartment in the service module with oxygen, spreading the fire further.

Speaker 6 Pressure continued to build, finally blowing off a whole panel on the side of the service module.

Speaker 6 Separated from the fire itself, protected from the command and lunar modules, the astronauts can see none of this. They can only hear and feel the havoc.

Speaker 1 Jim floated back to the command module. Quickly as I could, I followed.
Quick scan of the instrument panel.

Speaker 1 We had six, seven caution warning lights on, the master alarm, and a blue computer restart light on, which was highly confusing because the lights crossed systems.

Speaker 6 Back in mission control, Gene Krantz and his team are barely aware that anything's wrong until Swigert calls out over the radio. Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here.

Speaker 6 Capcom Jack Lausmer, in mid-conversation with Gene Krantz, only half-hears him.

Speaker 11 Mrs. Houston, say again, please.

Speaker 8 And there was a pause for about five seconds.

Speaker 8 And then Lovell comes on. All right, Houston, we've had a problem.

Speaker 6 In episode two, confusion reigns.

Speaker 5 Nothing made sense in those those first few seconds.

Speaker 6 Mission control can barely believe what they're seeing, let alone understand it.

Speaker 16 That can't be.

Speaker 16 I can't believe that right off the bat.

Speaker 6 But it soon becomes clear that this will be the fight of their lives.

Speaker 16 It's going down. We're losing it.

Speaker 16 Yes, we are.

Speaker 6 13 Minutes to the Moon is an original podcast from the BBC World Service. Our theme music is by Hun Zimmer and Christian Lundberg.

Speaker 6 This episode was written by me, Kevin Fong, and the series producer, Andrew Luck Baker. In the trench with us was series editor Rami Zabah.

Speaker 6 Technical production is by Tim Heffer and our story editor is Catherine Winter of In the Dark at APM Reports.

Speaker 6 Thanks to NASA and the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for the archive interview with Gene Krantz. Additional thanks to Simon Plumpton, aka Lunar Module 5.

Speaker 6 Find out more about the people and the tech behind this amazing story by going to bbcworldservice.com slash 13 minutes where you can also find season one of our podcast the story of the first moon landing we'd love it if you shared this podcast with your friends on social media our hashtag is 13 minutes to the moon and where you can please do leave ratings and reviews in your podcast app

Speaker 6 The World Service podcast editor is John Mannell and the senior podcast producer is Rachel Simpson And thanks to our digital team.

Speaker 6 Before I go, I just wanted to tell you about another podcast from the BBC World Service, one of our most popular to date.

Speaker 6 It deals with an event in Norway that took place in the same year as Apollo 13. 50 years on, Death in Ice Valley is on the case.

Speaker 23 An unidentified body in a remote Norwegian valley.

Speaker 20 She was laying with

Speaker 11 her head down there.

Speaker 6 Who was she?

Speaker 23 And what was she doing there?

Speaker 23 I'm Maritigrov.

Speaker 21 And I'm Neil McCarthy. And in Death in Ice Valley, we tried to find answers to a mystery that has remained unsolved for 48 years.

Speaker 17 There are somebody living who knows more about this case.

Speaker 23 Tracking down eyewitnesses and using new forensic technology.

Speaker 13 Now I'm cutting the truth.

Speaker 21 Telling a story set deep in the Cold War with strong hints of espionage.

Speaker 3 If you take the missile, I will shoot.

Speaker 23 But it left us with a lingering feeling that someone didn't want the truth to be known.

Speaker 21 Why all this secrecy?

Speaker 19 It was like a cover-up.

Speaker 13 What on earth happened that day?

Speaker 23 That's Death in Ice Valley from the BBC World Service and NRK.

Speaker 21 Just search for Death in Ice Valley wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 17 I think we'll break this case right now.

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Speaker 25 Hello, it's Ray Winstone. I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4, History's Toughest Heroes.
I got stories about the pioneers, the rebels, the outcasts who define tough.

Speaker 10 And that was the first time that anybody ever ran a car up that fast with no tires on. It almost feels like your eyeballs are going to come out of your head.

Speaker 25 Tough enough for you. Subscribe to History's Toughest Heroes wherever you get your podcast.