Apollo 13: 5. Life support

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It's my turn to be given 13 seconds before 13 Minutes to the Moon begins to talk about my podcast, The Hurricane Tapes.

I'm Steve Crossman.

Let's start that watch.

Three years before Apollo 13, boxer Reuben Hurricane Carter was convicted of murdering three people in a bar in racially charged Paterson, New Jersey.

I uncovered new evidence and 40 hours of tape recordings.

And that's my 13 seconds.

Search for the hurricane tapes.

Now, over to the main event.

A new toxic threat is creeping up on the crew of Apollo 13.

In Aquarius Houston, we're starting to think about

CO2 buildup, so we've got a recommendation.

And what we're running.

In the perishing cold darkness of the lunar module, the air is becoming poisonous to breathe.

We were exhaling carbon dioxide and slowly that gas was building up and it was of course very dangerous to breathe on high concentrations.

We were being poisoned by our own exhalation.

We were in in deep trouble again.

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, Houston, 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 don't blow the whole mission.

There's one whole side of that thing missing.

That's the end right there.

Episode 5.

Life support.

Oh, you're okay, Houston.

We just got a mass alarm and a ECS light.

I take it the

partial pressure CO2 is, yeah, that's what tripped it.

Once again, the master alarm buzzes in the cramped lunar module, alerting the crew to another deadly problem.

This time, it's the ECS, or environmental control system.

Their life support.

Of course, Houston second.

An orange CO2 warning light blinks on.

Jim Lovell, Fred Hayes, and Jack Swigert have barely started back towards Earth and are still more than 230,000 miles away.

They're scheduled for re-entry into the atmosphere in 62 hours.

Getting the astronauts home alive is now the sole aim of Apollo 13.

It's become a survival mission.

But this journey home will be every bit as challenging and complex as the first landing on the Moon.

Battery power and water are now perilously short.

Since the explosion, the crew and mission control have have stretched Apollo 13's resources to their limits, keeping vital systems running and the spacecraft flying.

But now the most fragile system of all is under threat, the astronauts themselves.

The next three days will be the most demanding of their lives.

They are cold, tired and hungry, but must still execute Mission Control's carefully crafted plans with total precision.

Their survival depends on it.

And right now, the carbon dioxide levels are rising, threatening to fog their concentration and then suffocate them.

Having dealt with the immediacy of the explosion and its aftermath, the flight controllers in Mission Control are now beginning to address more insidious threats.

Aquarius, the lunar module, is a safe haven for the astronauts.

But keeping all three of them alive in there is creating new challenges.

Once we had the initial problem sort of, you might say we had it at least under tow, we knew the direction we were headed, we began to have other problems.

In the hours after the explosion, Merlin Merritt, the flight controller in charge of the lunar module's life support systems, and his flight director Glynn Lunney, tracked the build-up of CO2.

Could we not?

That's affirmative.

All right, now we need to figure out some also for your CO2 scrubbing, right?

Right and and economy breathe out of carbon dioxide and the levels would build up It's kind of like being in a mine or kind of closed environment if you don't have some way to scrub the air in a spacecraft everything you exhale stays inside the cabin and unless you can find a way of removing the carbon dioxide or CO2, it builds up the effects of even small amounts of carbon dioxide in the air that you breathe are surprisingly profound.

At high concentrations it's poisonous, leading to coma and eventually death.

But long before it's reached that level it's toxic, affecting the way you think and markedly impairing your judgment.

And for a crew who will shortly be asked to perform a host of complicated, life-critical tasks under pressure of time, this is a huge threat.

Aquarius, the lunar module, has its own system for removing carbon dioxide, designed for its intended crew of two during their short excursion to the lunar surface.

But now that all three astronauts are crammed inside and set to stay there for several days, the lunar module's life support system is not going to be up to the task.

We noticed the carbon dioxide creeping up.

You know, you have a readout of that on the ground.

It was building up and of course it occurred to us, well, hey, you you know, we're not going to have enough life.

Once it's got saturated, it would quit removing the carbon dioxide.

And so we said, hey, we've got to do something.

The system depended on simple chemistry.

CO2 reacts with a chemical called lithium hydroxide, which removes the CO2 from the air like a sponge mopping up water.

In the lunar module, there were cylindrical canisters of lithium hydroxide that slotted into a round hole.

Here, a fan would draw air through them, removing the carbon dioxide.

But each canister can only absorb a limited amount of CO2.

And with three astronauts all breathing the same air in the tiny cabin of the lunar module, the lithium hydroxide is rapidly getting used up.

At this rate, they'll run out long before they get back to Earth.

Now, there are spare canisters in the command module, but there's a problem.

The command module was built by North American.

It had, as I recall, these square canisters.

The lunar module was built by Grumman aircraft and they had round canisters and so they wouldn't fit.

These are two state-of-the-art spacecraft worth billions of dollars but with a tiny difference in the design of their life support systems.

And yet for Apollo 13, this is what it comes down to, the shape of a hole.

A feature so seemingly unimportant that even detail-obsessed NASA hadn't thought through its implications.

But now it threatens the astronauts' lives.

There were no plans for this eventuality.

To rescue the mission, NASA would have to indulge in a rare feat of pure improvisation.

NASA had learned to be wary of creativity and inventiveness in the heat of the moment, knowing that plans hatched in the midst of battle often harbored hidden flaws.

But it had no choice.

In mission control, another team of engineers splits off to take on the problem.

Astronaut Tony England is assigned to the group.

We understood that we had to somehow get a hose, which we could plug into the landing module system, to draw air through this lithium hydroxide canister.

It's an unusual challenge.

Somehow the assembled engineers have to build an adapter so that the Apollo 13 astronauts can use the square command module canisters inside the lunar module with its round holes.

But they can only use what the astronauts have to spare inside the spacecraft, leaving them with a strange collection of random objects to work with.

So they had all this stuff on the table and so they were just, you know, taping it together and well this is going to work.

So it's kind of a makeshift deal.

We had cardboard and we had duct tape and we actually had a sock, one of the crewmen's socks, we stuffed down in to fill up a hole.

You know that's engineering at its best I guess.

And then used duct tape to make the whole thing stick together.

It had to be airtight.

It had to be durable enough that you didn't bump it apart all the time.

Also, when the canister was done, I mean the canister has a finite life, you had to be able to change it out.

So So these were all requirements of the design.

Starting from scratch, they have a very limited time to improvise and engineer a solution and they do this with the same obsessiveness that they bring to every other part of their spaceflight operation.

Dozens of people are involved.

Equipment is shuttled back and forth across the country on specially chartered flights.

The solution they arrived at was an ingenious but basic looking bit of handcraft, the cannibalized remains of spacesuits and instruction manuals.

But building it on the ground is only half the problem.

I wrote the procedures for instructing the crew how to build this canister system

and the backup crew then practiced it in a simulator and came out with exactly what we wanted them to do.

After two days of building, scripting and rehearsing, they are ready for their final performance.

Yeah we wish we could send you a kit and it'd be kind of like putting a model airplane together or something

as it turns out this contraption will look like a mailbox when you get it all put together.

Today we're so used to being able to send pictures to one another effortlessly and instantly.

But in 1970 Mission Control had no way of sending images of their improvised contraption to the Apollo 13 crew.

All they had was a set of carefully written instructions, a radio, and the descriptive skills of Capcom astronaut Joe Kirwin.

The carbon dioxide level in the lunar module was gradually going up and it had reached the normal maximum level.

They could still breathe, but you know, you could see it coming.

And I was sitting there

at the console when a bunch of guys I knew came in through the side door with a big brown box full of stuff.

And they went right to me.

They spread the stuff out on the floor and they said, This is how they're going to fix the carbon dioxide problem.

And you're going to have to read it up to Jack Swigert.

So we want to go through it with you until you know it.

And we went through that carefully, what they had to get,

where they went to get it, what they had to do with it step by step.

Okay, I'm ready to start into the procedure.

And he said, yeah,

as if he wasn't a little skeptical about the whole thing, you know.

It sounded sort of like a third-grade cut-and-paste project.

The first thing we want you to do, take one of the LCGs,

make two belts around the sides of the canister.

Okay, I've got it, Joe.

It'll probably take both of you to get it nice and stuck.

Over one belt near the top, and one do it carefully and close to the heat seal because and I forgot to tell you to get something to stick in that hole.

Wrap it around, stick inside out as

tight.

Cut off the outer bag.

We recommend that you either use a wet wipe or cut off a piece of sock and stuff it in there or you could probably even crumple up some tape and use that.

We did it one step at a time and we were talking to them as we put out the duct tape to see how long it should be and things like that.

We want you to take the tape

and cut out two pieces about three feet long or a good arm's length.

So go ahead and do that and then

we'll do the next step.

Kirwin patiently reads up the instructions.

While on board Aquarius, Lovell, Hayes and Swigert do their best to understand how to build the adapter.

Nearly an hour later, the task is complete, but no one can yet know for sure if they've got it right.

What they've built looks truly bizarre.

The command module's lithium hydroxide canister, a grey box about the size of a biscuit tin with a cardboard book cover arched over the top of it, enclosed in a plastic bag with a hose sticking out of the top.

When plugged into the lunar module's environmental control system, the whole thing worked a bit like a vacuum cleaner.

But instead of sucking up dust and dirt, it pulled in stale air and removed its its carbon dioxide.

You're loud and clear now, Fred.

Okay, I was just saying I uh we're getting uh mass alarms every few seconds and a.

That's Fred Hayes telling Mission Control that the master alarm is sounding more and more often.

Along with it, an orange warning light has been flashing, signaling the rising levels of carbon dioxide.

But Hayes is telling the team that the light is no longer simply flashing.

It is now on constantly.

We are ready to go ahead and get you on the command module canisters.

And as a first step, I'd like to know whether you've inserted the commander's red hose into the second canister bag over here.

It's time to put their hard work to the test.

They plug the hose into the lunar module.

If it's been designed and built correctly, then they should start to see the carbon dioxide levels fall.

Hayes asks if their makeshift CO2 scrubber is working.

And Kirwin reassures him.

Okay, I'll do a question.

We are reaching 0.2 on our CO2 sensor and we're all delighted.

It seems to be working fine.

Well, that looks great.

And it worked.

Lo and behold, again, I think another miracle, you know, that something like that would even work.

The Apollo 13 crew, as well as the mission control team on the ground, could breathe easily once again.

They'd followed the instructions perfectly and pulled off that rarest of things, an improvised procedure.

And let's have a moment here to recognize the man who led the effort to build the CO2 filter, a truly unsung hero of the Apollo program, Ed Smiley.

Smiley was the head of the Crew Systems Division, and he's incredibly modest about his life-saving contribution to the mission.

In 1999, he sat down to speak about his career for NASA's Johnson Space Center oral history project.

It was important.

We were pretty proud of being able to do it.

Nixon even mentioned our names.

I went back and looked at the list of people that I identified were involved, and it was probably 60 people involved in one way or another.

It takes a lot of people to do something like that.

The crew crew is only just able to maintain the fragile bubble of life support around them.

Having patched up the carbon dioxide absorbers, they are left in a lunar module that they can survive in, but one that is far from hospitable.

You know, we just ticked off everything that was not basically required to keep, you know, your basic electrical power, your cooling systems going,

keep the radio up, and that was about it.

It got very cold in the vehicle.

None of the main lights, no navigation computer.

None of the computer.

No heater?

No, yeah, the heaters were off.

The

inertial measurement unit I think was off.

The computer was off.

I mean nothing's off.

It was basically a cold clammy pit, you know.

There is nowhere near enough energy left to power up the heaters.

It is cold enough to chill the astronauts to the bone.

Their vehicle is losing more heat than their bodies and the few electrical systems they can afford to run can generate.

And the pace of activity is exhausting.

The constant problem solving and troubleshooting in an effort to stay alive has left the astronauts little time for anything else, not even sleep.

Like the module around them, the astronauts are slowly shutting down.

How are you feeling, Fred?

How much sleep did you get between the burn and

the time you got up for this exercise?

Oh no, I ain't been in the bed since.

Fred Hayes responds that he hasn't slept properly since the explosion 28 hours earlier at the time of this transmission.

Cold and fatigued, the astronauts are at the limits of their endurance.

If this continues, there is a danger it will interfere with their ability to think and act.

On the ground, people are beginning to worry about their lack of sleep.

When Marilyn Lovell speaks to Jim's former crewmate, Ken Mattingly, on the phone, she asks him about it.

Okay, well, has Jim gone to bed yet at all, do you know?

No, uh, he's still up.

Uh, Fred's sacked out right now, and uh, we're gonna have a change of command here in a little bit.

And uh, Jim and Jack are gonna sack out, and Fred will mine the store for a while.

Oh, okay.

Well that makes me feel better and he'll get some rest.

Marilyn isn't the only person who's worried.

I am Charles Olin Berry, B-E-R-R-Y,

MD.

My specialty is aerospace medicine.

I was chief flight surgeon at the time of Fall 13.

Dr.

Charles Chuck Berry was born in 1923.

He first worked for NASA in 1957 and had helped to select the original Mercury 7 astronauts.

He was there at the dawn of the space age with his doctor's bag in hand and helped to establish the new discipline of space medicine.

It was the legacy of Dr.

Berry's work in this field that first led me to Houston as a junior doctor to work as a visiting researcher with NASA studying the effects of spaceflight on the human body.

And so for me it was a huge honor to have the chance to speak with him in December 2019, just a few months before his death.

Dr.

Berry was the flight surgeon on console in mission control for Apollo 13.

It was the most risky mission that we had.

Definitely.

Were you worried that this might be a crew that wouldn't survive the mission?

Yeah, I was.

Yeah.

I was for a while, for quite a while, unfortunately.

When you realized how cold it was up there, you know, it was,

you know, around about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, a few degrees above freezing, really.

As a doctor, was that a source of great concern for you?

Well, it was a concern.

Definitely.

This is more than a trivial concern.

As a physician, Dr.

Berry understood that the sleep deprivation would lead to fatigue, and unchecked, the cold would lead to hypothermia, both of which would directly impair their ability to concentrate and think clearly.

To him, sleep was not a luxury.

It was vital to maintain the crew's health for the formidable mission-critical tasks to come.

He urged the crew to try and get more sleep, but it turns out that astronauts, rather than doctors, make the worst patients.

We had a uh a line communing with the crew that could not be picked up anywhere here on the ground, which was good.

In this direct line to the crew,

from you as their flight surgeon up to the crew, that was a private line, you were telling them they absolutely had to get more sleep.

Yes.

Were the astronauts resistant to the idea of getting more sleep?

Well, yeah,

because

they felt they had to keep such close track on all this stuff.

Were you worried that if they continued to be so deprived of sleep that they may start to make mistakes?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

You can hear the weariness in Jim Lovell's voice.

I guess I better eat something.

Hey, this one has a candy jellyfish.

Yeah, we've gone a hell of a long time without any sleep.

I know.

I

You can't fight your way through sleep deprivation.

Eventually, it impairs your performance and judgment as profoundly as drinking alcohol.

And so Dr.

Berry is desperate to get the crew to rest.

But his requests have been ignored.

And I tried to get Jim Lovell's wife to come and talk to them.

Marilyn had been nervously following the mission.

Through her squawk box speaker at home, she'd even been able to hear her husband's voice as he worked to keep his spacecraft flying.

But the idea of going to mission control, putting on a headset, and actually speaking to him was just too much.

I couldn't have done that at that point.

I think that if I had gone over there and I was to talk to Jim, I would have broken down in tears and I wouldn't want him to know that.

That would worry him.

We were cold.

We were kind of exhausted.

But what we did was take short periods of sleep.

Not long.

I'd fall asleep just about

floating around just in stand-up.

And that refreshed me all the time.

But you'd be surprised how long you can last if you're in deep trouble without a deep sleep.

In Mission Control, Capcom Joe Kirwin, who's a doctor of medicine as well as being an astronaut, is also worried about the crew's health.

Jim Houston, have you guys put on any extra clothes to try and ward off the nip of Jack Frost?

We put on all our spare underwear

and

we had two extra sets, so I had on three sets of underwear.

Unfortunately, cotton, not thermal underwear.

Jim Lovell and I wore our lunar boots.

Had them on our feet.

Jack didn't have that luxury.

We thought about using the spacesuits, but the problem with a spacesuit is you need cooling air.

Even in that environment, if you were in that spacesuit, which is a concealed rubber interior, you would have perspired.

They are not dressed for the occasion.

Floating in the lunar module with with only thin cotton bodysuits to wear, in damp, near-freezing conditions, the astronauts shiver.

The assault on their physiology doesn't end there.

Frozen and fatigued, the astronauts are also desperately short of water.

And what little there is also has to be shared with the lunar module's power systems, which need it for cooling.

Merlin Merritt and the Telmu team make this realization soon after the explosion.

The electrical components heat up and in those days you had to circulate this coolant, water, to cool the vehicle.

Flight director Jerry Griffin remembers it being one of their biggest problems.

Water turned out to be our shortest consumable

and the guys were rationed down to almost nothing.

On a normal mission, the fuel cells took an oxygen from the oxygen tanks and combined that with hydrogen to produce electricity and water.

But the fuel cells have been shut down.

All we had was stored water and

it got tighter and tighter and tighter.

As I recall toward the end of the mission we had they were only drinking about six ounces of water per day.

That's not much.

That's about a half a soda can.

of water for an entire day.

Together the mission control team and the astronauts had saved their vehicle and kept the crew alive.

But in doing so they'd created the least comfortable hotel room you can imagine and that's before you take a look at their menu.

The primary food we ate was freeze-dried which is powdered food

and you normally depended on hot water to mix with it in this plastic container.

bag

and if you mixed it well

and then ate it, sucked it out through a straw, a metal straw actually, with a valve on it to open or close, it didn't taste too bad.

But spaghetti

with semi-freezing water was not very good.

I know we had some very frozen hot dogs.

I don't think I really ate much at all.

I think that we sent Swiken back there to get some water or some stuff, and the stuff was freezing back there.

So we had to bring some stuff back in the lunar module so it wouldn't freeze the food

you know I have to tell you the truth I don't think I really I lost 14 pounds so you don't think I ate too much way back

now I pretty much lived off of a different

pantry section that had peanuts and little cookie cubes and bread cubes.

It's not quite a balanced diet, Fred, is it?

No.

Hayes survives on snacks.

Lovell is losing weight.

Malnourished, severely dehydrated, cold and sleep-deprived, the crew were now running on empty.

Many precise tasks lie ahead, and their race against time continues.

But with the crew's health and performance so thoroughly degraded, they are themselves now struggling to function.

The moon's gravitational pull is weakening rapidly as Apollo 13 travels away from it.

Until now, they have been slowing down, with the moon's gravity trying to keep hold of them even as its grasp weakens.

But they're about to escape its clutches.

Now, 200,000 miles from home, the Earth takes over and becomes the dominant force on the spacecraft.

They are accelerating again, as though they've crested the brow of a hill.

Psychologically, it's a significant milestone.

It feels like the home straight.

And Jack Deuston, for your information, Fino tells me that we are

in the urgent sphere of influence and we're starting to accelerate.

The crew may be feeling closer to home, but there are battles ahead to stop the spacecraft veering off course.

And time time appears to be running out to bring Odyssey back to life for the white heat of re-entry.

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

Our theme music is by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg.

This episode was written by me, Kevin Fong, and producer Chris Browning.

In the trench with us was series editor Rami Zabbar.

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

Thanks to NASA, Simon Plumpton and Issa Seng for their help with the mission audio.

To watch a film about how the crew put together the makeshift device that saved them from suffocation, search for the BBC World Service on YouTube.

And for more films, stills and explainers, go to bbcworldservice.com slash 13minutes.

We'd love it if you shared this podcast with your friends.

On social 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 Minnell, and the senior podcast producer is Rachel Simpson.

And thanks to our digital team.

If you enjoyed 13 Minutes to the Moon and you're looking for something else to listen to, the BBC has a huge range of brilliant stories.

This is one of them.

Here's a question.

A man escapes from one of the world's most brutal dictatorships.

He's risked everything to do it.

But once he's free, he digs a hole and he tunnels straight back in again.

Why?

I'm Helena Merriman.

I've been investigating an extraordinary escape story for the BBC.

A story involving a tunnel, a spy, and an American TV network.

It's called Tunnel 29.

Just search for Tunnel 29 wherever you get your podcasts.

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