Apollo 13: 2. Death of the Odyssey

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The explosion aboard Apollo 13 reverberates through the spacecraft.

In the cabin, the master alarm sounds.

Scores of warning lights flash up.

The crew is in trouble.

Commander Jim Lovell fears something catastrophic, but he doesn't know what.

We first thought that maybe a meteorite had hit the spacecraft.

Still, something is seriously wrong.

But nearly 200,000 miles away for the team in mission control, realization has yet to dawn.

Neat rows of flight controllers sit in front of their consoles, immaculately turned out in white shirts and thin ties, casually monitoring the readouts on their screens.

The room is relaxed.

Cigarette smoke curls up to the high ceiling.

This is the team of 20 somethings that put the first man on the moon, quietly confident.

But all of that is about to change.

Jack Lausmer is the Capcom for this shift.

I was talking with Gene Kranz, and

Jack Swigert said, Okay, we've had a problem here.

I said, say again, please, because I was talking to Gene.

I get a series of calls from my controller.

Project Apollo's lead flight director, Gene Kranz.

My first one is from a guidance that says flight, we've had a computer restart.

Fine, Guidance.

Go, guidance.

We've had a hardware restart.

I don't know what it was.

A second controller says antenna switch.

The flight controllers are suddenly snapping to attention and beginning to report in.

There are problems with the onboard guidance computer and now with the communications equipment.

And then Lovell comes on board, say, hey, Houston, we've got a problem.

Oh, Houston, we've had a problem.

Lovell's famous haunting words.

We've had a BB bus auto ball.

The electrical system is in trouble.

Nothing made sense in those first few seconds.

Many of the parameters just didn't indicate anything that we had ever seen before.

Alarms across the board, computer, communications, power, and now unexpectedly, thrusters kick in.

The spacecraft rocks and sways.

My controllers all of a sudden saw a lot of jet activity.

Jets were firing.

We then see Lovell, and this is all happening in seconds.

We then see Lovell take control of the spacecraft and fly into an attitude so he can keep communicating with us.

And for about 60 seconds, literally the calls kept, I mean, just coming in, but they made no sense.

They made no pattern right on the line.

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

I'm Kevin Fong, and this is the incredible story of the flight of Apollo 13, told by the people who flew it and saved it.

Okay, you see, we've had a problem here.

We've got more than a problem.

We lost O2 tank two pressure.

That can't be.

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

And one whole side of that spacecraft missing.

That's the end right there.

Episode 2.

The death of the Odyssey.

Now we've all had bad days at work.

But imagine being a flight controller in mission control on April the 13th, 1970, in the wake of the explosion as the chaos and confusion begin.

Imagine it's your job to bear the brunt of those failures.

My name is Cy Liebergat.

Unfortunately, I'm 83 years old now and my job in the control center was as an ECOM, which is the front room flight controller who is responsible for reporting and monitoring the health of roughly half of all the spacecraft systems.

As the ECOM, Cy Liebergott sat at a console with a screen showing data from the oxygen tanks, life support systems and the spacecraft's electrical power.

Electricity was the lifeblood of the spacecraft.

Without it, everything would simply shut down.

The command module would die, and the crew would shortly follow suit.

Let's listen to that opening flurry of communications again, but this time from a different perspective.

Now we're lucky here.

Cy Liebergott used to routinely plug a tape recorder into his own communications loop, and this captured conversations between himself, three engineers supporting him from a back room, and his boss, Gene Krantz.

The recording gives us a unique glimpse behind the curtain at NASA.

It's mission control like you've never heard it before.

Listen to the explosion of chatter that follows after Jack Swigutt says, We've had a problem here.

What's the matter with the data?

We've got more on a problem.

Okay, listen, listen, you guys.

We've lost fuel cell one,

and two pressure.

We lost O2 tank 2 pressure.

And temperature.

We've got a problem.

Okay.

Stand by, they've got a problem.

Roger main B undervolt, there, Jackson or E-com.

Negative flight.

O2 tank two pressure?

Believe the crew reported.

We got a main B under volt.

Now let's break that down a little.

In so-called back rooms, along corridors away from the action in mission control, were small teams of engineers who supported each flight controller.

They helped them make sense of the deluge of incoming data.

You can hear them in that clip reporting a loss of pressure in one of the two oxygen tanks, followed by problems with the electrical power.

The spherical oxygen tanks did more than provide the astronauts with something to breathe.

They also supplied the spacecraft's fuel cells, a piece of technology technology that combined hydrogen and oxygen to produce water and electrical power.

They look like renewable batteries.

It's really all they are.

And so they need oxygen and hydrogen in the right quantities to produce 28 volts DC of electrical power.

All the electricity in the spacecraft.

The electrical power was distributed to the rest of the spacecraft via something called the main bus.

And the water produced was used to cool electrical hardware and as the main source of drinking water for the crew.

So you can see that failures in this system were a big deal, simultaneously threatening the lives of the crew and the electrical lifeblood of the spacecraft.

These systems were so critical that NASA made sure they were well backed up.

Apollo 13 carried two oxygen tanks, two electrical buses, main A and main B, and three fuel

So back in mission control, Sai Liebergott can't quite believe that all of them might be on the verge of failing at the same time.

It just doesn't add up.

Mistakenly, he comes to the conclusion that none of this is really happening.

Instead, he thinks that the readings are due to malfunctioning sensors, blaming it on the messenger instead of recognizing the truth of the message.

He calls these instrumentation funnies.

We got a man B underloat.

Okay, fly, we've got some instrumentation funnies.

Let me let me add them up.

Raj.

Okay, standby at 13.

We're looking at it.

We may have had an instrumentation problem flying.

Raj.

You can hardly blame him.

Here's fellow flight controller Bob Hesselmeier describing what Cy Liebergott is seeing.

I am right next to Sy.

I'm here, Sai's here.

So I had a bird's eye view of

Sai's console lighting up like a Christmas tree.

And there's reds and greens and yellows.

And his console just glows.

Cy Liebergault.

The instrumentation went crazy.

Couldn't make sense out of it.

But the readout information on O2 Tank 2, oxygen tank number 2, it's gone.

There's no readouts.

They're gone.

And I'm watching O2 Tank 1 and it seems to be coming down in quantity and pressure.

And I was sitting here hoping that it was just an instrumentation thing we could solve by one or two switch throws.

First of all, a titanium sphere doesn't blow up.

It doesn't happen.

Yes, it does.

We're kind of in denial.

There's just no way.

Liebergot's flight director Gene Krantz also thinks they've been the victim of a relatively minor problem, that the crazy data they're seeing is simply connected to a malfunction with one of the spacecraft's communication antennas.

In reality, the antenna was knocked out of position when the service module's panel blew off.

I had written the time of this event as 55 hours, 55 minutes, 4 seconds, and I called over my communications guy.

Let's see if we can correlate those times.

Get the time when you want the wide beam there and call them.

And say, can you see if you can take a look at your data and see if anything else happened at the time of that event?

And he comes back and he says, Flight, that's when we also saw this antenna beam switch.

We went to wide beam with flight at 55, 55, 04.

So, all of a sudden, I went down sort of a false track to thinking, hey, we had had an antenna problem, a glitch in the antenna, some kind of an electrical short circuit.

And shortly, we'd resolve the problem and be back on track to the moon.

On board the spacecraft, things look very different.

To Fred Hayes, it's obvious that this isn't a problem that can be solved by flicking a switch.

The astronauts are seeing wild and erratic readouts on their displays.

Needles swing between good and bad.

But they know immediately this is something far worse than an instrumentation error.

Something that Hayes tries to tell Mission Control little over a minute after the explosion.

In this clip, you can clearly hear him reporting that along with the alarms, he heard a bang.

And we had a pretty large bang associated with the caution and warning there.

But in Mission Control, that crucial information doesn't register.

Mission Control has missed Fred Hayes describing evidence of a possible explosion.

Now, this is common in sudden crises.

Communication is often incomplete and imperfect.

And in turn, the astronaut crew fails to relay other critical details that would have helped confirm the proper diagnosis.

Now, we were not good at reporting because either Jack and I should have reported earlier because, looking out the window, immediately there was a sea of debris.

It's like frozen kernels of oxygen.

The cryogenics that up close looked just like popcorn or something, and a little further away were just sparkling light.

They can be forgiven their miscommunications.

On board the cramped Apollo 13 command module, alarms are sounding and the vehicle is rocking with misfiring thrusters.

There are many distractions.

200,000 miles away in Houston, the picture remains confusing.

The data they're getting is fragmented and sometimes incorrect.

Silibogot is still in denial and trying to troubleshoot the spacecraft's power system.

cells.

Fuel cell one to main A, fuel cell

three to main B.

Okay, let's just try that.

One, back to main A, fuel cell three, back to main B.

Main A, three to main B.

Let's see what happens.

It's all in vain.

Okay, Houston, I'm John.

I tried to reset and fuel cell one and three are both showing

gray flags.

But they're both showing zip on the clothes.

Hayes tells them that fuel cells 1 and 3 aren't working.

All the switching and swapping in the world isn't going to solve that.

Across mission control, all the other flight controllers are busy at their consoles battling their own problems and, like Sai Liebergot, are trying to make sense of them.

Are you seeing an attitude problem?

Are you seeing some high levels that are giving you problems?

Some low pressures, which would be symptomatic of the helium valve closing and firing some jets.

Capcom Jack Lausmer says nothing in their six months of otherwise exhaustive training had prepared them for a disaster on this scale.

The simulation instructors had forced them to rehearse almost every failure imaginable, but not this.

We had had what we call integrated mission simulations for the six months or so prior to the flight, where the spacecraft simulator is active with the mission control center and there are three diabolical guys in a side room.

They're called simulation simulation superintendents and they're the guys who dream up serious problems and throw them at you and this is the way we learned to handle those problems but this was a problem that we had never seen before.

Often our problems would be solved with doing something with instrumentation or a thruster is not working or we've got a leak or something like that, but not all of things combined.

And so for a while the mission control center was confused as to what was happening because we saw all of those kinds of things in one big fell swoop and so there's the question well is this real or isn't it

keeping control of your team in the face of something so chaotic is tough for mission control it's a dangerous time without proper discipline things will disintegrate But this is the genius of Krantz's leadership.

He finds a way to force his flight controllers to stop, reset their approach, and start again afresh.

And it's Jack Lausma who spurs him into action.

Jack Lausma, who's my Capcom,

comes to me and he says, Flight, is there anything that we can do?

Is there anything that makes sense?

Is there anything they can trust?

Is there any kind of leads we can give them?

Are we looking at instrumentation?

Are we got a real problem or what?

Lausma is sort of, he's sort of acting as my conscience right now because we've been sort of scattershooting in here.

And all of a sudden I start, instead of listening to every crew call and controller call and relaying it up, I start being much more selective in this process because I'm starting to get the feeling that this isn't a communications glitch.

It's something else.

We don't understand it.

So I proceed very meticulously and I call the controllers up and I tell them that, okay, you guys, quit you guessing.

Let's start working this problem.

Liebergott is mid-sentence when Krantz cuts in and suddenly decides to radically shift his approach.

Okay, but wait a minute.

We got a good main A bus.

Let's make sure that whatever we do doesn't screw up main A.

You got can we review our status here, Sai, and see what we've got from a standpoint of status.

What do you think we got in a spacecraft that's good?

It's eight minutes into the crisis.

It's now a struggle to keep enough power flowing through the command module's systems.

From Liebergott's back room, Dick Brown, the engineer monitoring the electrical power systems, or EPS, comes up with a solution.

He recommends that the crew resort to using one of the command module's batteries to keep vital equipment running.

Now, that might sound innocent enough, but the three small batteries in the command module are all essential.

Their role is to run the vehicle during the critical re-entry phase.

They're designed to last only a few hours and have to power everything from their guidance computer to their parachutes.

And that decision to use them now is going to haunt mission control later.

Using the batteries is a holding measure, but for now, it's nearly all they can think to do.

Aboard the spacecraft, the astronauts are cooling down, hungry for solutions.

Okay, Houston, are you still 813?

That's affirmative.

We're reading you.

We're trying to come up with some good ideas here for you.

In Houston, it's around 9:20 in the evening.

Somehow, the flight control team have kept Apollo 13 flying, but their heads are down, focused on that task.

Mission Control still haven't got a clear sense of what's happened, and still think there's a chance it might not be a real problem.

They start to call in team members from home.

What they need now is someone who can give them a handle on the big picture.

In a house a few miles from the space center, a telephone rings and John Aaron answers.

I was standing in front of a mirror shaving

and Arnie Aldridge, who was my supervisor, called

and he said, John, we got a problem out here and I need to talk to you.

John Aaron.

Nobody knows the e-comm systems better than this 27-year-old flight controller from rural Oklahoma.

It was his encyclopedic knowledge of the spacecraft's instruments that saved the mission of Apollo 12 when it was struck by lightning shortly after liftoff.

That's why Aaron's boss has called him.

He said,

these guys are chasing a problem out here and they are chasing it like it's an instrumentation problem, but he says, I don't think they're going to get there.

I said, well, Arnie, if it's an instrumentation problem, let me ask you to do something.

Would you walk by on some consoles and I'm going to tell you some parameters to give you a reading?

So I said, read me these two or three measurements.

He'd walk behind the console and he'd find him and say,

oh, okay, Arnie, those are, I understand that.

Well, now go over there and read out these five measurements.

He'd read those to me.

I said, Arnie,

tell those guys

This is not an instrumentation problem.

There's no single point connections with those set of parameters.

Tell those guys that is a real problem.

Tell them to start working as a real problem, and I'll be right there.

Back in mission control, the conversation between Siliebergot and his backroom support lurches from denial and disbelief to dread.

The truth is beginning to dawn.

We might have a pressure problem in a fuel cell, it looks like.

Charlie, now we're going to be able to do that.

Yeah, see the fuel cell simultaneously.

That can't be.

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

But they're not feeding currents.

Yeah, if you believe that N2 pressure, we blew a sphere.

And that's Sai Liebergot entertaining the horrible possibility that an oxygen tank may have exploded.

And it looks like Fuel Cell 3 is gone, too.

I don't know where to start.

We had a thing that we would do if things got real tense.

You know,

our consoles had handles.

Well, we use these handles as we call them security handles.

If there was a bad problem,

you could see us grabbing one handle.

And if it was a real bad problem, we'd be grabbing both handles.

And I had my hands on both of those handles because it was

a feeling of like being trapped.

You know, you get the cold feeling and the pity of your stomach, like, this is really bad.

But you can't get up and go home because, you know, a fleeting thought of getting up and going home did pass in my mind, but that was not an option.

14 minutes since the explosion.

So far, Mission Control has been concentrating on the electrical power system.

But now, from the spacecraft, Jim Lovell chimes in.

refocusing Mission Control's attention on a different threat.

It's a reading which the Ecom team have seen already but didn't believe.

One of the two oxygen tanks is empty.

Jack, our O2

quantity number two tank is referred to forget that.

O2 quantity number two is zero.

For Fred Hayes, this confirms his worst fears.

It was apparent that the two needles in different meters were in the bottom on oxygen tank two.

So that and there are different sensors that triggered those needles.

So I knew pretty assuredly that we had definitely lost oxygen tank two.

And his first thoughts turned to their lunar mission.

I was sick to my stomach with disappointment because I knew that would that meant we wouldn't land on the moon.

We had lost the landing mission.

So if you lost any one of the two critical elements,

always the answer was a board.

So it was not life-threatening.

You know, with the oxygen tank, I thought we'd just stay powered up and

eventually just keep going and come on back home as soon as possible.

But Hayes is wrong about that.

The Apollo 13 crew are in danger of losing far more than the moon.

Jim Lovell lifts his eyes from Odyssey's instrument panel.

I looked out the side window and saw escaping at a high rate of speed a gaseous substance out into the vacuum, which is like a hose going out, that I knew we were in deep, deep trouble.

We are venting something out into

space.

Roger, we copy your venting.

That's what I think woke everybody up to say, you know, this is something real.

It's a gas of some sort.

Lovell is seeing a fountain of liquid oxygen pouring into space and freezing in the vacuum.

But it's not coming from tank 2.

Its contents were lost immediately after the explosion.

This oxygen is coming from tank 1, leaking through a broken pipe, slowly but surely bleeding out the command module's last reserve of oxygen.

A chill descends on mission control.

Crew thinks they're vetting some of the

Okay, let's everybody think of the kind of things we'd be vetting.

G and C, you got anything that looks abnormal in your system?

Negative flight.

How about you, Ecom?

You see anything that with the instrumentation you got that could be venting?

That's a fair flight.

Okay, let's start scanning.

What was going through your head when Lovell said that he could see something venting from the spacecraft?

Terror, because there couldn't have been a worse vindication of what we were seeing.

And to me, it was so obvious that that's probably what the problem was, that we had blown the tank and it was venting out, and I didn't want to deal with it at that point in terms of

describing anything.

Of course it was probably that.

I assume you've called in your backup e-coms

e-com

flight signing.

Have you called in your backup e-coms now?

See if we can get some more brain power in this.

We got one here, Rog.

In Houston, the sense of alarm starts to build, but Krantz steps in quickly to cut it off.

Okay, now let's everybody keep cool.

We got Lim still attached.

The Lem spacecraft's good, so if we need uh to get back home, we got a limb to do a good portion of it with.

Okay, let's make sure that we don't do anything that's going to blow our CSM electrical power with the batteries or that will cause us to lose the main or the uh fuel cell number two.

Okay, we want to keep the O2 and that kind of stuff working.

We'd like to have RCS, but we got the command module system,

so we're in good shape if we need to get home.

Let's solve the problem, but let's not make it any worse by guessing.

But the situation is only going to get worse.

Two of the three fuel cells are down, and the spacecraft is losing its oxygen supply.

They're now in survival mode, trying to save what they can.

Sai Liebergott's backroom support engineer, Dick Brown, makes a blunt assessment.

They need to save power.

It's time to start switching off some of the equipment in the command module.

E-communists, EPA.

Joe, I think we ought to start powering down.

Yeah.

Liebergot and his backroom team scramble to find their emergency checklists.

There's a written procedure even for this.

Yes, there's a rush, but things have to be powered down in exactly the right way, in exactly the right sequence.

Dick, which one you want?

Emergency what?

Uh, Coast BTC, emergency power down.

Charlie?

Uh, Charlie.

A144.

Let's get in the checklist.

Okay.

All.

Emergency.

Cy Liebergott now has to tell Gene Krantz that the crew must put this plan into action.

And you can hear from Liebergott's hesitancy that he doesn't quite know how to break the bad news to his flight director.

Flight, go ahead.

I think the best thing we can do right now is start a power down.

Okay, uh, let's go down the emergency 1-5.

What?

Do you want to go to uh power down?

Give me the page.

Uh, emergency 1-5 flight.

We'll go down and uh try to get a delta of 10 amps reduction.

Liebergot is asking for a huge reduction in power.

10 amps.

Krantz can barely believe it.

Listen out for the low whistle.

What do you want to power down to?

I want to power down a total of 10 amps flight.

A total of 10 amps.

That's fine.

Okay.

But Krantz gets over it quickly.

Liebergot is the expert, and he accepts his recommendation, wasting no time in passing the instruction up to the crew.

Capcom, we'd recommend emergency power down checklist 1-5.

We want to power down a total or a delta of 10 amps from where we are now.

Liebergott's state of denial is almost at an end.

He's given up on two of the three fuel cells.

He knows that one of the oxygen tanks is empty, but he's not sure why.

And now he's sharing his fears about the last remaining tank with backroom support engineer Larry Sheiks.

Half an hour has passed since the explosion.

The diagnosis is nearly complete.

The prognosis is poor.

The situation is becoming more and more and more and more desperate.

We're still not at the bottom because now it looks like this oxygen tank is shot.

The second oxygen tank, oxygen tank one, is now continuing to decrease.

Two of our fuel cells are offline, and these are our principal power generation systems that we use.

And

about this time, Kraft has come in.

Chris Kraft, a titan of Project Apollo, the man who invented the very concept of mission control.

Krantz needs his support, gets him in, and delivers a frank summary.

He was home showering.

I had had Lenny give him a call.

And when Chris comes in, it's probably the only vernacular I've ever used that I'd probably never used again.

I says, Chris, we're in deep shit.

Capcom Jack Lausmer adopts a more upbeat turn of phrase when he radios Jim Lovell with some words of reassurance.

Okay 13, we've got lots and lots of people working on this.

We'll get you some

dope as soon as we have it and you'll be the first one to know.

Lovell's response is terse.

Thank you.

By this time, Jim's wife Marilyn is back at home after having watched her husband do do his TV tour of the lunar module less than 45 minutes earlier.

She knows nothing of the crisis yet.

I had just arrived home and everything was very quiet and the phone rang and it was a friend of ours, Jerry Hammack.

Hammock is a NASA official who coordinates naval operations for returning crews on Splashdown.

The first thing he said to me was,

the Russians have offered

this country, country, that country, they all have offered for the spacecraft to land there.

And I said, what are you talking about?

And he said, well, hasn't anyone told you?

And I said, what?

And then he told me that

they were having a main problem and they weren't going to be able to land.

And so here you are.

You've had a phone call from a friend telling you that the mission's in trouble.

What's going through your mind at that point?

Well, at that point, Jane and Pete Conrad had just, one of the other astronauts had just walked in and

I put the phone down and I told Jane, I said, I can't believe this, they're not going to land.

At this point, I think Pete Conrad picked up the telephone and talked to him.

Of course, then the television went on and I turned around and by the time the phone call ended, my house was absolutely full of people.

All our friends and neighbors, they were just pouring in one by one.

And

I had to get away, and

it was just too much for me.

And so

I ran to the bedroom, and people followed me.

And I ran into the bathroom, and I closed the door, and I literally got on my knees and prayed.

Odyssey is now a doomed vessel.

The remaining fuel cell needs oxygen to produce electrical power.

For the oxygen to flow to the fuel cell, the remaining oxygen tank needs to have enough pressure.

But the tank is leaking, and its pressure is falling.

When it gets too low, the flow will cease.

and the power will be lost forever.

To boost the pressure, the crew will have to turn on heaters in the tank.

But that action will consume more electrical power, taking precious amps of current from the ship's already stretched energy budget.

It's a vicious cycle.

The ship is going down.

Let's

have them turn the heaters on manually in O2 Tank 1.

And we'll watch the pressure.

Tank 1.

Capcom, we want to get cryo O2 tank number 1 heater on.

We'd like to build up the pressure in O2 tank one, so turn the heaters on manually.

We'll waltz your pressure for you.

Okay, Joyce,

we're going to get a main bus A underbolt, probably.

Roger, we realize that.

We'd be able to stand five more amps on it.

Okay.

But that doesn't work.

ECSECOM, go.

It looks grim.

Yes, it does.

Get to five amps and no pressure increase.

Still, just took five.

Just went down.

It's going down.

We're losing it.

Yes, we are.

In the last-ditch effort, Liebergott's team asked the crew to switch on the fans in the tank, hoping that this might boost the pressure and get the oxygen flowing.

It's desperate stuff.

Let's try the fans, okay?

You want the heat left, leave the heaters on, right?

Yeah, if it's not causing any problem on your bus.

Flight econom?

Go ahead, Ecom.

Uh, I want the fans on and uh, O2 tank one, we're not not seeing a pressure increase.

We can stand it.

You can stand it?

That's right.

Fans on in tank one, right?

Primitive flight.

13 Houston, we'd like you to additionally bring on the fans in O2 tank one, and we can stand the additional amperage on that.

You bring up the fans in O2 tank one.

Again, this doesn't work.

It's been 46 minutes since the explosion.

Cy Liebergott is about to make a drastic recommendation.

Flight Ecom.

Go ahead, Ecom.

The pressure in O2 Tank 1 is all the way down to 297.

You better think about getting in the LEM or using the LEM systems.

He's referring to the LEM, the lunar module, Aquarius.

He's urging Kranz to seriously consider using it not as a lunar lander, but as a lifeboat for the crew, now that Odyssey is foundering.

But this is far from a well-rehearsed plan.

Here's Jack Lausmer.

The LEM lifeboat, of course, is something we had on paper, but nobody ever gave it too much thought or too much attention and simulations.

We never did a Limb lifeboats simulation that I know of.

It was a piece of paper with a name on it but nobody ever thought that would happen.

For NASA this is the stuff of nightmares.

Almost unthinkable.

They've lost their mission to the moon.

They're losing all of the command module systems and are now in danger of losing the crew.

Terrifyingly, there is no fully formed contingency plan that they can fall back on.

They give us tank one.

You can hear the desperation in their voices.

See, that juice is still going down there, Econ.

Okay, I'll start up with Director Kelly.

Flight, Econ.

Any more suggestions on trying to pump up O2 tank one pressure?

No.

Flight, we're going to hit 100 psi in an hour and 54 minutes.

That's the end right there.

When you turn around and you say, we've got an hour and 54 minutes left, and that's the end right there, what do you actually mean?

End of the command service module.

Not the end of the crew, because

I understand there was at least one guy that

said that he, when he asked, he said, we really thought we had lost the crew.

When that was told to me, I said, there's no way we ever thought we were going to lose the crew.

That's not how you solve problems.

And this is an interesting point, because is it that you never thought that their lives were in danger or that you just wouldn't allow yourself to devote time to thinking about that?

The question did not arise, but we were not confident we were going to get the crew back.

I think this is probably the point in the mission.

where everybody has realized that we've now moved into a survival mode.

Because with two of the three fuel cells shut down, we're not going to the moon anymore.

We're going to just be damn lucky to get home.

It's coming up to 55 minutes since all hell broke loose.

In the remaining quarter hour of his shift, Liebergott and his team pursue a theory that the oxygen is leaking from one of the dead fuel cells.

They ask the crew to close a valve inside it in the hope it will stop the escape of precious oxygen.

It doesn't work.

It's been the toughest, most bruising shift of Sai Liebgott's life.

He's done everything he can think to do, but despite this, in his mind, he hasn't risen to the exacting standards of mission control.

Of course, I felt I was a complete failure.

That goes with

the job.

Did you?

Did you feel responsibility for this failure?

I felt I failed.

Absolutely, because we trained to be perfect.

I wasn't perfect.

And that's...

yeah, I wrote in my book

about the bad dreams I had.

You had bad dreams during the mission or after?

Oh, afterwards.

It surprised me, too.

You know, the last dream that you tend to remember, I believe, is the waking dream.

And you wake to it, you'll remember it, at least for a time.

And I started having these

waking dreams where I would relive the whole episode

minute by minute absolute clarity

and it would it would be the same sequence of events and I'd feel badly about it and wake up and mope around and and went on for two weeks but anyway but after about two weeks of these

they weren't nightmares just a bad dream of reliving the whole thing and one morning I had the waking dream and

started and I saw here it comes again.

This time though, I made all the right calls.

I said, looks like there's a fire in tank number two flight.

We got to pull the breakers on the circuit breaker panel 226, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then just tell the crew of the boo-ba-ba.

Every call was right on the money.

And the end result was exactly the same.

And I never had the dream again.

The mind is a wonderful thing.

I mean, it sounds like in the immediate aftermath of the accident,

you were quite traumatized.

Oh, sure.

I wouldn't have been able to vocalize it as as you just did, but yeah, I wasn't perfect.

Gene Krantz is also coming to the end of his shift as flight director.

They've taken a beating, but they still have options, though none of them is good.

At the time the explosion occurred, we're about 200,000 miles from Earth, about 50,000 miles from the surface of the moon.

We're entering the phase of the mission.

We use the term entering the lunar sphere of influence.

And this is where the moon's gravity is becoming much stronger than the earth's gravity and during this period for a very short time you have two abort options one which will take you around the front side of the moon and one which will take you all the way around the moon if i would execute what we call a direct abort in the next two hours we could be home in about 32 hours but we would have to do two things we'd have to jettison the lunar module which i'm thinking of using as a lifeboat and we'd have to use the main engine and we still have no clue what happened on board the spacecraft.

The other option, we got to go around the moon and it's going to take about five days but I only got two days of electrical power.

So we're now at the point of making the decision which path are we going to take?

The crew of Apollo 13 is still in peril.

But for Chin Krantz and his team, the shift is at an end.

For Krantz, the temptation not to relinquish control to the incoming team must be overwhelming.

They're still in the thick of the fight.

But in another demonstration of his skill and judgment as a leader, he has the discipline to give way.

All flight controllers, I'd suggest you start handing over because I think a fresh team is probably going to be thinking clearer.

I think the rest of us can continue working in some other function in support of the new team coming on.

Let the fresh guys come on and try to figure out where do we go from here.

In episode three, a new shift of flight controllers picks up the batten.

There's a race against time to get out of the dying command module and into the lifeboat.

The crew is alive, but only for now.

13 Minutes to the Moon is an original podcast from the BBC World Service.

Our theme music is by Hun Zimmer and Christian Lundberg.

This episode is written by me, Kevin Fong, and the series producer Andrew Luck Baker.

In the trench with us us is series editor Rami Sabah.

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

Thanks to NASA and the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for the archive interview with Gene Krantz and Bob Hesselmeier.

Additional thanks to Sai Liebergott and also to Simon Plumpton and Issa Seng for their help with the mission audio.

You can find films, photos from the archive and more about Apollo 13 at bbcworldservice.com forward slash 13 minutes.

With the BBC World Service podcasts, we're trying to reach people all over the globe.

So if you know someone who's never listened to a podcast before, we'd love it if you could show them how to listen and how to find 13 Minutes to the Moon.

The World Service podcast editor is John Minnell and the senior podcast producer is Rachel Simpson.

And thanks to our digital team.

team.

For this season of 13 Minutes to the Moon, we've been working with a story editor from another podcast, In the Dark from American Public Media.

If you haven't heard it, In the Dark is a brilliant investigative podcast.

Its latest season is about a case of four people killed in a small town in Mississippi and why an African-American man on death row has been tried six times for their murder.

It's a case that takes many twists and turns and ultimately impacted the entire US justice system.

Find In the Dark Now wherever you get your podcasts.

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Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

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Winner, best book!

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It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

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Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.