Apollo 13: 4. Power brokers

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Speaker 5 I'm Moretigrov and just before 13 minutes to the moon starts, I've been given 13 seconds to tell you about my podcast, Death in Ice Valley. Okay, here goes.

Speaker 5 It's about something else that happened in the same year as Apollo 13 in Norway. The discovery of an unidentified body of a woman.
Who was she? I've been trying to find out.

Speaker 5 That's death in Ice Valley.

Speaker 2 Apollo 13 is approaching the fourth day of its ill-fated flight. Nine hours ago, an explosion crippled their command module.

Speaker 2 They have battled against failing systems and a dying spacecraft ever since.

Speaker 2 It's now all about creating what opportunities they can from moment to moment and this is how they hope to buy their survival. Across the United States millions tune in to the television coverage.

Speaker 2 Veteran CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite leads the nation through the crisis.

Speaker 7 The flight of the Apollo 13 to the moon is in serious jeopardy this morning and is not going to make a moon landing.

Speaker 7 And this is indeed the gravest emergency probably yet in the American space program.

Speaker 2 Their life support and power are running out. They're now on a path that will take them home, but traveling too slowly to get them back to the right place on Earth in good time.

Speaker 9 Our job was basically to try to figure out what on board the spacecraft was still usable and to come up with a game plan to get them home. We had a command module that was our re-entry vessel.

Speaker 9 It had the heat shield, but it had only about two and a half hours of electrical power lifetime. We had the service module, which is where the explosion had occurred, and it was virtually useless.

Speaker 9 We had the lunar module that was attached in the other end of the stack through a small tunnel, and that was our lifeboat.

Speaker 9 We're going to be outside all known design and test boundaries of the spacecraft. We've got to come up with the answers.

Speaker 9 And the crew was quite concerned that they still didn't have the game plan in hand.

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

Speaker 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.

Speaker 2 Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here. We've got more than a problem.

Speaker 10 We lost O2 tank two pressure.

Speaker 8 That can't be.

Speaker 10 Let's make sure we don't blow the whole mission.

Speaker 8 There's one whole side of that spacecraft missing.

Speaker 3 That's the end right there.

Speaker 2 Episode 4: Power Brokers.

Speaker 2 Flight Director Jerry Griffin is coming on shift to take charge of mission control for this next critical stage of the mission.

Speaker 2 And he remembers exactly where he was when he learned that Apollo 13 was in trouble.

Speaker 11 I went out to play a softball game. The game was finished.
Just about the time we finished,

Speaker 11 they came out and got me and said, you better get back to the control center. We've had a problem.
I actually walked back into the control center still in my softball uniform and

Speaker 11 I you know I could tell as soon as I walked in the room that it was serious. The looks on their faces were enough.

Speaker 11 Lunny and standing behind Kranz, both of them with stern looks on their face, I knew something bad had happened and sure enough it had.

Speaker 2 Jerry Griffin takes up his position in the mission operations control room amidst rows of flight controllers at their consoles.

Speaker 2 He begins his task of fending off the myriad threats facing the spacecraft and crew.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, in a small room in the depths of the mission control building, Apollo lead flight director Gene Krantz has assembled another group of flight controllers away from the immediate fray, and this becomes known as the Tiger Team.

Speaker 2 Griffin's job is to deal with what's happening right now, but Krantz's Tiger Team is tasked with anticipating what lies in the future and solving the urgent problems that will threaten the lives of the crew as the rescue mission unfolds.

Speaker 2 Jim Kelly, an expert on the command module's electrical power system, is chosen to join Krantz's special group as it gathers in the small room.

Speaker 13 It was about maybe 15 by 15, 20 by small room.

Speaker 13 There was standing space only. Kranz had called his Keep People in and those people that he called, if they had somebody that they wanted, they grabbed them.

Speaker 9 This is a data room.

Speaker 9 It's a room that is used only when there's trouble. And you can sense trouble in this room.
It's got two overhead TV monitors. It's got one small comm panel in there.

Speaker 9 But it's just filled with gray government desks around all sides where people can spread out their records and start going over them.

Speaker 13 You know, it wasn't panic. It wasn't chaos.
It was just, you know, we just didn't know it.

Speaker 13 We had no concept of what was going on. At that point,

Speaker 13 we knew we were in trouble.

Speaker 2 At that point, did you worry that this might be a crew that you were about to lose?

Speaker 13 Now, in the back of our mind, to answer your questions, yeah, that was probably there.

Speaker 9 I made sort of a brief opening speech because I had a lot of new players who were starting to show up from the engineering community. We had astronauts who were reporting right on board.

Speaker 4 I think he probably could read the mood in the room, and so he started to give the pimp talk.

Speaker 2 But flight controller John Aaron isn't buying it.

Speaker 4 He gave me a raw raw talk.

Speaker 13 He told me, guys, we've got this thing powered down.

Speaker 4 We've got the web guys in there, everything's going good. We're going to be able to get this thing all set up, and we'll get this thing back on a free return trajectory.

Speaker 4 We'll whoop around the moon, come back to the earth, and when we get close to the earth, we'll power up the command module, come home. And I raised my hand.
And I said,

Speaker 4 Gene, you can't do that. He said, well, why not? He

Speaker 4 I said, you don't have enough power to do that.

Speaker 2 In a room full of senior engineers, 27-year-old Aaron has just interrupted NASA's most senior flight director, pointing out a fundamental problem.

Speaker 2 If this was a normal mission, the command module Odyssey would be running on power from the service module almost all the way to the critical phase of re-entry.

Speaker 2 It would then switch to its own three small batteries only for the final 30 minutes to splashdown.

Speaker 2 But with Apollo 13 service module well and truly out of action and Odyssey shut down, those three batteries don't have enough energy in them to bring the command module back to life for several hours and keep it operating all the way through re-entry.

Speaker 2 Grants pauses, acknowledges what he's being told, and fires back with a snap solution of his own. He puts John Aaron in charge of the problem.

Speaker 4 What that allowed to do is it says, you know, rather than having a whole huddle of committees all around the center and around the nation trying to get their version of what the power sequence would be,

Speaker 4 he appointed one man to manage that critical resource.

Speaker 4 That's a brilliant maneuver on his part, and he did it in about 30 milliseconds, I will say.

Speaker 12 So then he left the room.

Speaker 4 And so then we were sitting there, and the rest of the guys looked at me and said, okay, well, John,

Speaker 4 how are we going to do this?

Speaker 2 The newly elevated John Aaron gazes at the room of engineers in front of him, already knowing that there won't be enough battery power to run all of their systems, knowing too that Krantz has made this his problem.

Speaker 2 Sacrifices will have to be made. Difficult decisions and bruising conversations lie ahead.

Speaker 13 John said, he says, just leave us alone for a minute. And he and I, they all evacuated, went went somewhere, got coffee.
I don't know what they did, but John and I were left in this room by ourselves.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 4 Jim and I scratched our heads and so forth. And that's what the whole thing began.

Speaker 4 It became a brokering between, you know, how much we have versus how much you want.

Speaker 4 And do you have to have it? It's a classic way to do it.

Speaker 13 The first thing we came up with was bare minimum. You know, we didn't even know what we had at that point, but yet,

Speaker 13 we had no idea how much energy we had, but yet we were looking at a way to get home. And I guess that's the old thing, and you put the donkeys before the cart.

Speaker 13 In this case here, we had the cart before the donkeys. And I boil that back to the simulations we had.
We weren't accepting failure.

Speaker 2 There are no easy answers. Even power for apparently essential systems cannot be guaranteed.

Speaker 13 Our challenge was to control the energy in the batteries, to make make sure any procedure or anything we came up with could not exceed the capacities that we had. This is what we could afford to have.

Speaker 13 You guys go put some switches to it.

Speaker 2 But all of that means that you and John become the bearers of bad news for people who want to know whether they can power their systems or not.

Speaker 13 And that did happen.

Speaker 13 I was kind of a buffer for John, you know. I was his buffer.
Gary Cohen, who is the guidance and navigation

Speaker 6 front room guy,

Speaker 13 and Gary says to him, he says, I really got to have the guidance. I got to have the computer.
And I says, Gary, I don't have enough. I don't know what I have, but I can't give it to you right now.

Speaker 2 But that episode that you describe of telling the guidance officer that the automated guidance system upon which the crews have always depended to find their way in space, that they're asking for to guide them through a very delicate, very accurate re-entry,

Speaker 2 they're coming to you and asking for that to be, to have power for that, and you're saying, you can't have it.

Speaker 13 In my mind, the first thing we had to do is what is the bare bone necessary thing that I really need to survive?

Speaker 2 What was it like for you? Because you're working pretty hard across the four or so days of recovery of this.

Speaker 2 What's it like for you, eating, sleeping, working?

Speaker 2 What does that look like for you?

Speaker 13 Well, Brenda brought me clean clothes. My wife did, my bride.

Speaker 6 I always call her my bride.

Speaker 13 Cheryl brought John the same stuff.

Speaker 13 We took cat naps in our chair, power naps, whatever you want to call it nowadays. One nap,

Speaker 13 I remember taking it, rested back in my chair, but I don't remember how I got on the floor.

Speaker 2 While the controllers on the grounds begin days and nights of argument over the limited power budget, the astronaut crew is focusing on a more immediate problem.

Speaker 2 They don't know precisely which way the spacecraft is pointing.

Speaker 2 This, the spacecraft's orientation or attitude, is all important for their guidance and navigation.

Speaker 2 If you don't know which way the vehicle is pointing when you fire the rocket engine, you can't be certain where that engine will take you.

Speaker 2 Usually they'd use the Apollo guidance computer and star sightings to determine their orientation, using them like cosmic landmarks. But right now, they can't see the stars.

Speaker 9 One of the things that was giving us problem

Speaker 9 was that this explosion that occurred had set a cloud of debris around the spacecraft and frozen particles of oxygen. And we normally navigate with stars, and we couldn't see stars anymore.

Speaker 9 All we could see was the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon.

Speaker 2 The debris twinkling like glitter around the spacecraft camouflages the stars, making them impossible to identify.

Speaker 2 This is a serious problem because somehow they need to check the accuracy of Jim Lovell's hasty alignment of the spacecraft's orientation.

Speaker 2 But Mission Control realizes that there is one star that the crew can still identify: the Sun.

Speaker 2 Astronaut Jim Lovell explains the radical solution.

Speaker 14 In the computer of the lunar module, was

Speaker 14 37 heavenly bodies, mostly stars, but also the

Speaker 14 Sun, the Moon, and the Earth. And if we asked the

Speaker 14 guidance system to point our optics at a body, a star or something like that, it would do it. And so I asked the guidance system to point our optics to the Sun.

Speaker 2 Using the Sun for alignment is less than perfect, far more inexact than using distant stars, but it's essential that this rough alignment check works. And Flight Director Jerry Griffin knows it.

Speaker 11 They couldn't do a real platform alignment in the lunar module. And

Speaker 11 we came up with a little test where

Speaker 11 by looking through a telescope and if they could see any part of the sun, we were close enough.

Speaker 2 And that's one of the things I find fascinating about about it. The AOT, the Alignment Optical Telescope,

Speaker 2 is a precision instrument. It's out there to find points of light in the sky so you know precisely which way you're pointed.

Speaker 2 And yet, here you're going to accept the Sun and not just the whole Sun, any part of it.

Speaker 11 Any part of it, if you could just see it. That was a big moment.
Big moment.

Speaker 6 If that had not worked,

Speaker 12 we were in trouble.

Speaker 2 Jim Lovell punches instructions into the computer, commanding the spacecraft to maneuver so it's pointing the telescope towards an area of the sky where the Sun should be.

Speaker 2 If Lovell has set up the computer correctly, if they're properly aligned, it should be able to find the Sun.

Speaker 2 Fred Hayes peers through the eyepiece as the telescope pans across the sky, waiting and hoping to see its edging into view. There's the sun.

Speaker 2 Give me the uh give me the AOG.

Speaker 2 Colletch, you can see it better.

Speaker 14 If you listen to the discussion between Fred and myself, I think I see it. Is it coming?

Speaker 6 I don't know.

Speaker 15 A little bit more? No, it's coming.

Speaker 15 We got it.

Speaker 15 You instilled it, Brian?

Speaker 16 Go ahead, Aquarius.

Speaker 8 Okay, it looks like the boat checks out.

Speaker 2 Lovell announces that the sun check has been a success to the audible relief of Jerry Griffin.

Speaker 9 And hey, we understand it checked out.

Speaker 16 We're kind of glad to hear that.

Speaker 11 Jim, Lovell, and I talked about it later, that there weren't many people that knew how important that was. They knew it.
And I knew it for sure. A whole team did that was on duty.
And

Speaker 11 I can recall I could hardly read my writing in the notes. I was so nervous

Speaker 11 when they said it's okay. You know you figure those kind of things out when you get in trouble.

Speaker 2 And for Flight Dynamics Officer Dave Reed the Sun was all they needed. Perfect was the enemy of good enough.

Speaker 17 Was it as precise as going to a star? No.

Speaker 18 But was it sufficient to get exactly done what we needed?

Speaker 12 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Dave Reed was part of a self-styled elite group within mission control whose role absolutely depended on that sun alignment check.

Speaker 2 They were responsible for shaping the course of the spacecraft and tracking it as it flew through space.

Speaker 2 This group of controllers saw their role as being the stuff of proper rocket science, and they gave themselves a name, the Trench.

Speaker 17 The Trench got its name early on during the Gemini series. There were three positions in the flight dynamics area.

Speaker 17 One to my left was the retrofire officer, then there was myself in the middle, which was trajectory determination and maneuver determination. And to my right were my guidance officers.

Speaker 12 So the three of us together formed a triad.

Speaker 17 Given we got this name Trench and it stuck, it's become somewhat legend now. There's books out on it.

Speaker 12 But that's who we were.

Speaker 2 Senior Flight Dynamics Officer Jerry Bostick.

Speaker 19 Well, we were a proud bunch on the front row.

Speaker 15 Mission Control Center was tiered, and we were down in the front row, which was like a trench.

Speaker 2 Now, I've heard people describe the trench as the last line of defense in human space exploration.

Speaker 19 The first line of defense.

Speaker 19 The trench was the first line of defense in manned space line operations. And

Speaker 12 as I said, we were a proud bunch.

Speaker 2 There's no disputing the fact that the trench played an essential role or that they were counted on to to make huge decisions with total confidence.

Speaker 17 I remember they sent a crew in to test me in a situation. They wanted to find out if it's possible to put a percentage call on decisions we were making.
So they threw a bunch of tests at me.

Speaker 17 Afterward, they debriefed me and they said, well, now, when you made that decision, what was your

Speaker 12 idea? How accurate were you?

Speaker 17 I mean, were you 60, 40, 70?

Speaker 17 I said, I was 100%.

Speaker 18 They said, you can't be. I said, yes, I was.

Speaker 17 And I said, don't ever think that a controller in this room is going to go up to the flight director and say, flight, I think I got a 70% idea that, you know, this might work.

Speaker 12 And I was 30% that won't. You wouldn't last two seconds in that room.

Speaker 17 I said, look, you make a decision.

Speaker 12 That's a decision. That's black and white.

Speaker 17 If it didn't come out right, eat it later.

Speaker 12 But you're not going to go up to the guy and say, Yeah, leave it to you, flip a coin.

Speaker 17 No, it doesn't work that way.

Speaker 2 With the guidance platform now aligned, and with Apollo 13's crew having clawed themselves out of immediate danger, there is time for the astronauts to take a moment and collect themselves.

Speaker 2 Hayes and Swigert are drawn to the windows and the view outside.

Speaker 2 The moon, so close at hand, so beautiful, and so completely out of reach.

Speaker 2 Fred Hayes.

Speaker 1 We were tourists again. We had cameras

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 we had lots and lots of film we'd never used.

Speaker 1 And so we were busily shooting pictures.

Speaker 1 And Jim Jim was still down, I think, realizing this was the second time and he'd lost a landing. And he had been there looking at the moon

Speaker 1 quite a quite a few revolutions on Apollo 8.

Speaker 1 So he wasn't that interested in our

Speaker 1 picture taking.

Speaker 2 Was he irritated, do you think, at that time?

Speaker 1 I don't think irritated

Speaker 1 more than just still in the background. I'm sure he was severely disappointed.

Speaker 2 You approach it just a little over 100 miles, isn't that right?

Speaker 1 About 130. 130 miles.

Speaker 2 What was your impression of it looking at it?

Speaker 1 I was most impressed by how rugged it's in. We really only saw half the backside.

Speaker 1 At the time we flew as a half moon. So if you're on the Earth, you saw half the moon and conversely we saw half the moon on the backside.
But the areas we saw,

Speaker 1 that half,

Speaker 1 overall were much, much more rugged looking, beat up, bigger.

Speaker 1 abundance of craters. The only smooth areas, and we shot good pictures of them, was

Speaker 1 both named by Russia since they got around there the first time

Speaker 1 and had naming rights. One was Siakoski, and that was a beautiful, dark, fairly large crater with a little mountain in the center.

Speaker 1 And the other one was Sia Moscow.

Speaker 1 So we got good pictures of those. But everywhere else, it was just a modeled landscape.
I mean, beat up.

Speaker 1 Okay, look at it. Let's get the cameras right away.
Get off Mr. Bird.

Speaker 1 So you have one chance now.

Speaker 2 Jim Lovell there almost scolding his rookie crew, telling them to put the cameras away. Their respite has been brief.
The time for tourism has passed.

Speaker 2 The next order of business is getting home to the right place at the right time.

Speaker 2 Their earlier efforts have put them on a course that will get them back to Earth and into the Indian Ocean. But timing is everything.

Speaker 2 It determines how far they have to stretch their limited life support and power. And just as importantly, it decides which ocean they'll arrive in and who will be there to rescue them.

Speaker 2 Trench Flight Controller Chuck Dietrich.

Speaker 15 The recovery position in the Indian Ocean was not very good. What we would do if we really had to come back a place like that, we'd have to depend on commercial shipping to pick the vehicle up.

Speaker 15 That really wasn't a good plan at the time.

Speaker 4 The trajectory guys came up with this brilliant plan that says, and we're going to go around the moon,

Speaker 4 because the trajectory guys didn't like to land in the Indian Ocean. Nobody wanted to land in the Indian Ocean.

Speaker 4 We could speed this process up, but those guys figured out that if you just said two hours after that you exit the moon,

Speaker 4 we're going to do a big maneuver and send this thing home.

Speaker 2 The crew is approaching Pericinthion, the point of closest approach to the moon, the point at which the spacecraft is travelling at its fastest and where it takes the least amount of fuel and thrust to alter its path back to Earth.

Speaker 2 Now, in a normal lunar mission, this is where the crew would fire their main engine to accelerate them away from the moon and bring them back to Earth, a nail-biting maneuver in itself, out of contact with the Earth and in radio silence on the far side of the moon.

Speaker 2 But Apollo 13 is way off its original flight plan, travelling too slowly to get home to the right place and in time before life support and power are exhausted. It needs to speed up dramatically.

Speaker 2 And so they come up with a plan to do a burn two hours after they've passed Pericinthion, called the PC plus 2 burn.

Speaker 2 If it worked, it would get them back on time and into an ocean where the crew had a better chance of being recovered by US Navy ships. Flight Director Jerry Griffin.

Speaker 11 We came up with this PC plus 2 was Pericinthian, which is point of closest approach to the moon, plus two hours. So go around the moon two hours later, do this maneuver.

Speaker 11 We calculated that we could do it using the descent engine on the lunar module, get them home about a day earlier, and also get the landing point back in the Pacific

Speaker 11 close enough that we could get a carrier.

Speaker 2 So I mean and this is one of the parts of the story I find so amazing, that you're choosing oceans at this point.

Speaker 12 Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11 Well, you know, when you go into deep space, I tell the youngsters

Speaker 11 at NASA today that deep space is different, you know, than low Earth orbit.

Speaker 11 A, you can get them home in a hurry from low Earth orbit, come down virtually on any rev.

Speaker 11 We were three and a half days from home. What we did would position oceans, landing points, where you had recovery forces.

Speaker 11 You got to think differently, totally differently.

Speaker 2 It would be a long burn with the engine firing for four and a half minutes, but it would get them back ten hours earlier.

Speaker 2 The PC plus two burn was one of the most critical maneuvers of the whole mission. But that decision and the shape of the solution was left to the young flight controllers in the trench.

Speaker 2 Jerry Griffin deferred entirely to the expertise of people younger and more junior than him.

Speaker 2 And that, as he explains, is the nature of spaceflight operation.

Speaker 11 I think you've got to have a team like that in order to do this kind of thing. Spaceflight is tough.
It's not easy. It's really, really hard.
But get the right people on it and

Speaker 11 motivate them and empower. You know, we did,

Speaker 11 we had decisions in those days made at these very low levels. You know, today everything

Speaker 11 tends to elevate decisions to the higher levels.

Speaker 11 But we, throughout the program,

Speaker 11 we made the decisions at the right level.

Speaker 18 We had the

Speaker 13 faith and the confidence of those people in mission control.

Speaker 13 And part of that goes back to the simulations.

Speaker 13 When you run these simulations day after day

Speaker 13 and you make a mistake,

Speaker 13 you're not the only one that knows it. The crew knows it.

Speaker 13 The guy next to you knows it.

Speaker 13 The little bug on the floor knows it.

Speaker 13 You learn very fast who you can trust,

Speaker 13 who you can go to bat with, and who you have to second guess.

Speaker 13 And normally the second guessers never got there.

Speaker 2 And later, when Jerry Griffin and Glenn Lunney present the plan to NASA's most senior hierarchy, they too understand the the critical nature of the decision and how it has to be made.

Speaker 11 The two of us went to brief NASA management, went up into

Speaker 11 a viewing room of the other floor of the control center. And we were looking, here's these two young guys, we're looking into the eyes of

Speaker 11 people like

Speaker 11 George Lowe, Bob Gilruth. Chris Kraft, Deke Slayton.
I think Von Braun was there.

Speaker 2 So this is human space exploration royalty.

Speaker 11 Yeah, it was the leaders of

Speaker 11 space.

Speaker 11 And here you have these two young guys that

Speaker 11 supposedly have all the answers. So we briefed them on all the options.
And finally, Glenn's the one that said, and the one we favor is the PC Plus 2.

Speaker 11 Unlike maybe that would happen today, well, have you thought about,

Speaker 11 we thought we might get that question, why haven't you thought about this? Why haven't you done that? There was just a long silence.

Speaker 11 Finally, the head of the agency, Tom Payne, said, What can we do to help you?

Speaker 4 That was it.

Speaker 11 I remember walking back into the control center, and I hadn't thought of this till just now, and saying,

Speaker 11 and put my headset down and say, guys, we got a plan.

Speaker 2 Aboard Apollo 13, the crew prepared to arm the lunar lunar module's engine. The propulsion system wasn't designed for this.
It's meant to land the fragile, spider-like lem on the moon.

Speaker 2 Now, it will be used to drive the lunar module and the attached 15-ton command and service module, accelerating all of that to nearly 3,400 miles per hour.

Speaker 16 Apollo 13, now 5,426 nautical miles out from the moon, traveling at a speed of 4,552 feet per second.

Speaker 2 Aboard the lunar module, Jim Lovell looks down at the moon for landmarks, finding craters in the crosshairs painted onto the window, making sure that their orientation is still correct.

Speaker 2 And finally, they're ready to go.

Speaker 16 Ground confirms ignition.

Speaker 16 Larbari, 40%.

Speaker 16 Houston copies.

Speaker 16 Attitude looks good at this point.

Speaker 8 Roger?

Speaker 2 This is still risky.

Speaker 2 Their main command and service module engine is out of action, so they're dependent instead on the weaker lunar module propulsion system.

Speaker 2 For the crew and mission control, it's a novel but critical maneuver.

Speaker 2 Jim Lovell.

Speaker 14 First of all, we're using the lunar module engine. So the thrust of the lunar module engine wasn't the same as the thrust of the command module.

Speaker 16 Boris Houston, you're looking good.

Speaker 2 This is a strange way to use the lunar descent engine. What did you think of that? I mean it's a long burn to get yourself on that PC plus two trajectory.

Speaker 6 Had to trust it.

Speaker 16 Reports to Flight Director Gene Krance indicate all systems are looking good.

Speaker 16 Coming up on three minutes into the burn.

Speaker 14 We were very careful to watch as this thing was burning ahead on the guidance of the commuter system.

Speaker 14 The countdown. As we kept burning, it kept coming down and down and down and down and down until it kept burning until all the way to zero.

Speaker 16 The onboard display shows less than a minute to go in the burn now.

Speaker 14 Which meant that we had gathered the velocity increment necessary to get us out. If it had watching the commuter system and it started going down and down and stopped.

Speaker 16 Don't forget descent rate went off

Speaker 16 10 seconds to go.

Speaker 14 Then we'd been really worried about, can we start it up again?

Speaker 6 Do we get ourselves in some really oblong orbit around the moon?

Speaker 14 Or do we get something that was just going to drift off, you know, out into space someplace? So that's why that was so important.

Speaker 8 Shut down.

Speaker 16 Roger, shut down. That was Commander Jim Lovell reporting shutdown.
The engine is off. We're at 79 hours, 32 minutes into the flight.

Speaker 12 That lunar module was just incredible

Speaker 11 throughout that whole mission. I wish we could have gotten it back so we could

Speaker 11 say grace over it like we did the command module. But the lunar module saved us.
And that burn,

Speaker 11 man, that old engine just

Speaker 11 stayed right at it.

Speaker 16 Follow control.

Speaker 16 79 hours, 33 minutes, 5,707 nautical miles out from the moon at this time. I say that was a good burn.

Speaker 2 Until now, Mission Control has been operating in a low power state, leaving just enough of its systems running to guide the PC plus 2 burn.

Speaker 2 But it's time for some real austerity. There is barely enough battery power left in the lunar module to keep even essential systems running.
Flight Flight Director Gene Krantz.

Speaker 9 The power level, you can explain it very simply.

Speaker 9 It was about the equivalent of 200 watt light bulbs in your house, or about a quarter of what today's microwave uses, and that's what we had to sustain.

Speaker 9 It was a survival level to get the crew all the way back to Earth.

Speaker 2 They desperately need to save battery power, so mission control begins to switch off almost every system in the spacecraft.

Speaker 2 Merlin Merritt is one of the flight controllers responsible for the Lunar Module's electrical and life support system.

Speaker 20 The agreement was that we had with Glenn and Gene Krantz and the Powers at Be that we were going to power this thing down to a bare minimum.

Speaker 2 So no lights, no navigation computer?

Speaker 20 No navigation computer. I think there was maybe some one little residual lighting, but yeah, the heaters were off.

Speaker 20 The

Speaker 20 inertial measurement unit, I think, was off. The computer was off.

Speaker 2 This is a miserable turn of events, both for the crew and the team in mission control.

Speaker 2 It will reduce the spacecraft to a little more than a husk coasting in space, leaving the astronauts freezing cold, in darkness, robbed of nearly every comfort.

Speaker 2 Bill Peters was the flight controller in charge of sharing out the lunar module's tiny budget of electrical power.

Speaker 6 One flight controller would say, well, I need the inertial measurement unit or I need the radio. There were hundreds of boxes that could be turned on or off.

Speaker 6 And those discussions were back and forth and negotiated.

Speaker 6 And, you know, people would realize, well, you know, if we don't do this, then we won't make it.

Speaker 6 Eventually, they were negotiated down from a 60-amp level to a 12 amp level in terms of requirements. We had, I forget how many circuit breakers and switches in the ship, you know, a couple of hundred

Speaker 6 that you could individually turn off components and those components were evaluated and decided, you know, do we really, really, really need that or not?

Speaker 2 Now that is a massive reduction. Peters is trying to get down to a power consumption of just 12 amps per hour.

Speaker 2 And to put that into into context, it's only around enough battery power to run a pair of car headlights at full beam.

Speaker 2 Only in the case of Apollo 13, if the battery dies, so does the crew.

Speaker 6 Well, we turned off the

Speaker 6 anything to do with the propulsion system, anything to do with guidance navigation, the computers,

Speaker 6 the gyroscopes,

Speaker 6 all the

Speaker 6 things that allow you to navigate and control the ship. In other words, we left it as just something that you could sit inside of and breathe.

Speaker 6 Up until the point that I was sitting on the console and we watched them power down completely, I had butterflies in my stomach for days.

Speaker 6 being quite uncertain as to what would really happen because we had never operated at that level.

Speaker 6 That was only an analysis that we did in the office using a computer to say, okay, yeah, we can do that maybe.

Speaker 6 But we never did it. So when the power level actually went down to 12 amps, my butterflies went away.
I was euphoric, I guess,

Speaker 6 saying, hot dog, our plans have worked.

Speaker 6 And now all we have to do is survive for a few more days.

Speaker 2 For Fred Hayes, the drop in power is more than just an abstract concept.

Speaker 1 Power down

Speaker 1 was actually more than I had assumed we could go to.

Speaker 1 Again, things had been worked on the ground by people thinking about it. And we went down to about 12 amps versus 18.

Speaker 1 So an even lower power usage. And

Speaker 1 the heat inside is generated from equipment running. So we were not in a very good thermos bottle.

Speaker 1 Probably in the limb with three of us in there and the power, we were in the mid, we weren't to freezing yet, the zero Celsius, as you know it, or 32 degrees Fahrenheit. We're probably mid-30s.

Speaker 2 There is one more difficult power challenge to face up to.

Speaker 2 Bill Peters is busy stretching out the dwindling battery power in the lunar module to keep the astronauts alive in their lifeboat on the way back to Earth.

Speaker 2 But John Aaron is in charge of managing the power in the command module for re-entry, and he has problems of his own.

Speaker 2 For re-entry, everything in the command module, the navigation, guidance computer, the parachutes and the thrusters, has to run on three small batteries.

Speaker 2 But in the opening hour after the explosion, the mission control team were forced to use these batteries to keep the command module running, draining some of their energy.

Speaker 2 So John Aaron needs to recharge them. And there's only one place he can steal the spare electrical power from.

Speaker 2 And so he sends Jim Kelly to get it.

Speaker 4 I said, Jim, you know those winter module backroom guys better than I do. Go over there and ask those guys to save us a little power so we can recharge these batteries.

Speaker 6 And I looked at what I had in the power budget and I said, well, we've saved some for emergencies such as a battery failure or instrumentation inaccuracies and that sort of thing.

Speaker 6 We saved some extra power and I looked at it and said, well, yes, we could do that if you,

Speaker 6 yes, absolutely. So we gave up our spare power budget to the command module so they could recharge their batteries.

Speaker 13 Since it was a battery charging a battery and the cable resistance and the cable and stuff,

Speaker 13 I I think it was, the efficiency was horrible. I mean, it was just absolutely horrible.
You know, we might have needed maybe

Speaker 13 30 amp hours, but it took them almost 80 or 100 amp hours of their battery to give us 30 amp hours of energy.

Speaker 13 Without the batteries, in the command module, without any capability to replenish the power that was taken out, there was no

Speaker 13 electricity to bring the crew home.

Speaker 14 It got cold, it just got damp, you know.

Speaker 14 As it got cold, the moisture came out of the atmosphere and

Speaker 14 we were worried and we would go back into the command module. It got so cold that Swiker was with us most of the time.
So it got really beads of moisture all through and of course that worried us.

Speaker 2 Jerry Griffin knows exactly what what conditions are like on board the spacecraft. And as the battle for survival continues, his thoughts are with the crew.

Speaker 11 Every Apollo mission that I was involved in, I felt like I was in a cockpit with them. I think most of us did.

Speaker 11 Every time we did a maneuver, I tried to say, okay, if I was there, what would it look like? What would it feel like? We knew how cold it was for him, one thing.

Speaker 12 We also knew that all three of them were in the lunar module,

Speaker 11 which is not very big.

Speaker 11 And thank goodness it was zero G because they could, you know, fill spaces you couldn't on the ground.

Speaker 11 But if you just went inside the lunar module and said, three guys are going to live in here for three and a half days or whatever, you'd say, whoa.

Speaker 11 We all knew what they were going through. They knew what they were up against.

Speaker 2 In episode 5, the moon continues to recede behind them.

Speaker 2 The crew is on their way home, but there is no guarantee they'll get there alive, and new dangers face Lovell and his crew, not least suffocation.

Speaker 14 We were exhaling carbon dioxide and slowly that gas was building up. Our CO2

Speaker 14 value was getting high. We had a 50 DCS light.
We were being poisoned by our own exhalation.

Speaker 2 13 Minutes to the Moon is an original podcast from the BBC World Service. Our theme music is by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg.

Speaker 2 This episode is written by me, Kevin Fong, and producer Mark Rickards. In the trench with us is series editor Rami Zabar.

Speaker 2 Technical production is by Giles Aspen and our story editor is Catherine Winter of In the Dark at APM Reports.

Speaker 2 Thanks to NASA and the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for the archive interview with Gene Krantz. Additional thanks to Simon Plumpton and Issa Seng for their help with the mission audio.

Speaker 2 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 the world service podcast editor is john munel and the senior podcast producer is rachel simpson and thanks to our digital team

Speaker 2 If you've enjoyed 13 Minutes to the Moon and you're looking for another podcast to listen to, here's another extraordinary real-life story from the BBC.

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