Apollo 13: 6. Earth in view

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Here goes.

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Now, over to Kevin.

200,000 miles from home, the crew of Apollo 13 are falling from an enormous distance back towards Earth.

traveling faster and faster, thousands and then tens of thousands of miles per hour as they get closer.

But to enter the atmosphere safely, they'll need precision as well as speed.

Ever since the long PC plus 2 burn they did after swinging around the moon, Retro Flight Controller Chuck Dietrich has been closely tracking the spacecraft's trajectory.

And he's noticed they're off course.

After PC Plus 2

we were going to actually miss the Earth and we had a resulting perigee of 87 miles.

And a perigee?

Perigee is how far above the Earth you are and we needed to be down a perigee around 20 miles to even be out of the atmosphere.

Off course by almost 70 miles and entering at too shallow an angle, this trajectory will see the astronauts ricochet off the upper layers of the atmosphere and maroon them in space.

They need to take action.

They need to correct their course.

But flying their powered-down spacecraft comes with a host of new challenges.

Our guidance system was no longer on.

How can we make a change if we don't know where we are?

How can we make a change to know where we're supposed to go?

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

That's the end right there.

Episode 6.

Earth in view.

Lovell, Hayes and Swigutt are presented with a challenge that no other Apollo crew has ever faced.

They're forced to do a critical course correction burn without their inertial measurement unit, the 3D compass needle that tells them which way the spacecraft is pointing.

Remember, that's been switched off, so there'll be enough power in the lunar module's batteries to get them back to Earth.

The crew's lives now depend not on their computer, but on their instincts as pilots and explorers, the dead reckoning of their eyeballs and the movements of their hands at the controls.

During the burn, of course, you'll be controlling pitch and roll.

Autocrap.

Hayes and and Lovell begin to steer the spacecraft, pivoting it around, trying to point it in the right direction so that when they fire the lunar module's engine, it will send them on the right course.

And they are looking for a solid reference point.

Go ahead, Aquarius.

We're maneuvering around here to fish for the Earth.

They have lined up a crosshair on the lunar module's window pane with the shadow which crosses the whole of the Earth's surface from north to south, the line between night and day, known as the Terminator.

Even from hundreds of thousands of miles away, this feature is distinct enough to guide them.

With the console switched off, the only thing they can use to time the burn accurately is Jim Lovell's wristwatch.

Swigert will be the timekeeper, and the burn needs to last exactly 14 seconds.

This isn't like the much longer PC plus 2 burn where they were trying to speed up.

This is all about getting back on the right course.

We were all busy, everybody had their own particular job to do because getting the spacecraft in the proper position manually was rather difficult.

For the astronauts, this is old-fashioned flying, very nearly by the seat of their pants.

Lovell pitches the spacecraft up and positions the crosshair on the terminator.

Hayes controls the roll, maneuvering it round until he catches a glimpse of the Sun through the Lunar Module's Alignment Optical Telescope.

With these two reference points fixed, the Earth and the Sun, they're almost ready.

Okay, Houston, we have our attitude set.

Roger Jim, I hope the guys in the back room will put this up right.

Say what they're saying.

Amazingly, Jim Lovell had actually rehearsed this maneuver while training for Apollo 8, but back then, he never imagined he'd have to do it for real.

Okay, Aquarius, attitude looks good here, and your choice when you want to start the burn.

For 14 seconds, one of the first men to orbit the moon briefly becomes a pioneer again, flying his spacecraft using celestial bodies for navigation, relying purely on his skills as a pilot.

And market, one minute.

Roger Fred.

In a support room in mission control, Poppy Northcutt, an engineer who specializes in return to Earth maneuvers, sits waiting, knowing how essential it is to get the spacecraft's course right.

You can come in at the wrong angle and burn up.

You can come in at the wrong angle and skip off the atmosphere and go deflect it off into space.

It's extremely important that the burn be accurate.

No guidance computer, no autopilot.

In the dark, Lovell has his hand on the red engine ignition button, the other on the lunar module's pitch control.

At his side, Hayes will control Yaw.

Engine arm to defense.

14 critical seconds.

Jack Swigert floats just behind his crewmates, his eyes glued to the second hand of Jim Lovell's wristwatch.

Ignition.

The spacecraft was very difficult to maneuver.

Thrust looks good.

I, of course, had my eyes peeled on the optics to make sure the glossier stayed on the Earth's terminator.

Shut down.

Okay, looks good.

Nice work.

Let's hope it was.

Neither the astronauts nor the flight controllers know if the burn has worked.

In its low-power state, the flow of data from the spacecraft has slowed to a mere trickle.

It will be hours before they know for sure.

Think about going to the pub and you're shooting darts.

And say you're 20 feet away from the dartboard.

If you have a little bit of error in your dart shooting, you'll still hit the dart board, right?

You might not hit the bullseye in it, but you'll hit the dartboard.

If you're just off a little bit in the angle of your throwing of the dart or a little off in

how

hard you're throwing.

Now move that back so so that you're a mile away from the dartboard.

A tiny error is going to miss the board entirely.

During the burn, Fred Hayes was watching two yellow needles on the lunar module's control panel, which gave a rough measure of how steadily they were holding their course.

Decades later, in conversation with me, he recalled that maneuver with the characteristic understatement of an old and bold pilot.

You didn't have to hold it very long.

There's very little deviation, in fact.

It was easy to hold.

The needle's pretty well centered.

Your description of it is somewhat at odds with the Apollo 13 movie.

Yeah, if you look at the mission report,

we did not move even one degree in any axis.

So it's a bit of a work of fiction, the scene from the movie.

Oh, yeah, well, that's Hollywood.

Mission Control analyzes their data.

The 14-second burn is good.

Their course is not yet perfect, but it's close enough for the time being.

And there are now more pressing matters.

The physical stresses of the mission have suppressed Hayes' immune system.

He is becoming unwell, with an infection affecting his bladder and kidneys.

We had our spacesuits off, and it was...

still kind of cold and getting colder and Fred was getting chilled and I wondered what the story was with him.

Were you worried about him?

Yeah, I was worried about Fred.

So I

comforted him a little bit, put my arms around him, trying to get my body heat, get him some more heat in his body.

I had developed the

urinary tract infection

and had gone through chills and fever kind of thing.

I felt fully competent and alert.

A little adrenaline helped keep you alert in any case.

But no, I was not bedridden by any means, even from that particular affliction.

As you can tell, Fred Hayes is nothing if not resilient, and here he's downplaying the seriousness of his illness.

We now know that spaceflight depresses the immune system even before an astronaut is malnourished, cold, and short of sleep.

On Earth, a urinary tract infection severe enough to spread from the bladder to affect the kidneys is a cause for concern in anyone.

And so for Hayes, locked in his spacecraft, it would have been dangerous.

The lunar module Aquarius has been the astronauts' home now for three days.

Despite the lack of creature comforts, it has kept them safe and more than done its job as a lifeboat.

But it can't get them all the way home.

They still need the sturdy command module and its heat shield for re-entry.

And so, with less than 24 hours left before they're due to reach Earth, their attention must now turn to heading back into Odyssey, their dead command module, and trying, somehow, to resurrect it.

Flight Director Gene Krantz has put John Aaron in charge of that task.

He's working with electrical systems specialist Jim Kelly.

Normally when you power up the spacecraft you go out to the pad and take two or three days to power it up very systematically you know and check everything on the data stream and all that and sit there for three days and then watch.

That's not the power-up we could do.

The command module is dead.

We had three batteries only.

There's no other power source.

For the past two days, Aaron and Kelly have been working on this exact problem.

They're trying to power up a spacecraft that was never designed to be shut down in space.

And trying to do that in a way that gives you enough systems to navigate home and survive re-entry and splashdown, but without using so much power that your batteries run dead before the crew is safely home and dry.

John Aaron finally has a solution.

Working with just enough battery power to keep a hairdryer running for a couple of hours, he has spread that across the systems in the command module as thinly as he dares.

He thinks it will work, but his ideas now have to be turned into a set of explicit instructions that can be read up to the crew by Capcom.

This involves dozens upon dozens of switch throws that have to happen in exactly the right sequence.

If they get it wrong, if they use too much power, they won't survive.

To reiterate, if the battery dies, the the crew dies.

So they're taking their time to get the procedures just right.

But aboard Apollo 13, Jim Lovell is getting impatient.

I kept looking at the Earth and it was getting a little bigger all the time.

And I thought to myself, we don't have the procedures to get the command module guidance system working again, to get it reactivated.

And we had to make sure that all the environmental system was going back and everything like that.

And so I called down.

I said, guys, we've got to hurry up.

I see the Earth coming in closer.

We need to know how to power up the command module.

Well, I was quite worried.

Did it ever occur to you that the procedure list might never arrive in time?

Well, that gave me a thought that the procedure wouldn't arrive, but I would have...

you know, been talking to them in all kinds of foul language if it hadn't arrived.

So

I guess they got the word that that was the one thing that they had to work on.

I mean, they stall you a couple of times, don't they?

At one point, I think Joe Kirwin, in response to your question, says, you say, is there a checklist?

And he says, it exists.

I asked Joe Kirwin about that.

At one point, he fairly grumpily asks, where's the checklist?

And you reply, it exists.

Get a little philosophy there, huh?

I knew that Ken Mattingly and the guys were over in the simulator polishing that thing off and checking and rechecking it and making sure it was right.

You know, nobody had ever powered up a command module from zero, especially not in orbit.

This was not supposed to happen.

It was cold.

There was condensation

in the command module.

It was a cold, dirty swamp in there.

And the object, you had three hours of battery power, was to get that thing up switch by switch, subsystem by subsystem, until it was fully powered and still have time enough to jettison the service module, get the stars and align the platform and a command module, then jettison the lunar module and do all that stuff and get into attitude and come home.

And it was a crowded menu.

So

I don't blame Jim being grumpy.

He wanted to get in there and go over at one time,

please.

And any way, they were getting tired.

And Mission Control's delaying tactics didn't end there.

We're just having a ball down here working on all kinds of new procedures.

And

we expect to have your entry procedures out here by Saturday or Sunday at the very latest.

Saturday or Sunday

at the very latest.

Of course, you were due to splash down on Friday.

Just a little bit too late.

Jim and Joe can laugh about it now, but at the time, the pressure was very real, especially for John Aaron.

We got this sequence really compressed.

I wonder if the crew can do it.

As soon as we got to that point, they could go test it in the simulator.

It was my ideas and Jim Kelly's ideas and a couple others, but it wasn't my plan.

By the time it got read up, it was everybody's plan.

It had been smoked over really close.

And,

you know, we had thousands.

the whole country was working on that plan.

With just 17 hours to go before re-entry, Lovell is still waiting impatiently for the procedure.

John Aaron and Jim Kelly are hurrying down corridors with a clutch of papers in their hands, having called ahead to tell Mission Control that the plan is finally ready.

And we're ready to read you the first checklist installment.

Okay, Jack, I'm going to get, or Van, I'm going to get Jack on the line for that, and he'll stand by.

Okay, and he'll need a lot of paper.

We walked in there with it.

I think a flight crew support guy was with it.

We walked in there with it, and it was a stack of stuff, and laid it on the flight director's, on the Cap console and said, okay, here it's ready, read it up.

And the first thing I heard in the room, and I think it was from Kranz, where's my copy?

And I said, this is it.

He said,

time out, go run 25 copies of it.

Copies in 1970 were not as easy to make as they are today.

Wait one, we want to get one into the hands of Flight NECOM.

And

it'll take about a minute or two.

I'm sorry to wake you up for this, but uh take about a minute and then we'll read it up to you.

Love's patience.

Run sounds.

Go ahead, Aquarius.

Vance, we've got to realize that we've got to establish a work rest cycle up here, so we just can't wait around here.

We're just reading procedures all the time up to the burn.

We've got to get them up here.

Don't get up, and we've got to

get the people to sleep.

So take that consideration when you're getting ready to

set up beds.

I know, Jim, we're very conscious of that.

We should be ready to go in about five minutes.

That's all I can say.

Stand by.

Okay.

Finally, John Aaron returns with 25 copies of the power-up procedures in hand.

Okay, procedures coming back in again with multi-copies for distribution.

Ken Mattingly, bumped from the flight, has been heavily involved in creating the checklist.

He'll now read the vital procedure up to the crew.

Hello, Aquarius, Houston.

How do you read?

Okay, very good, Ken.

Okay,

let me take it from the top here.

And the first item then, after you get ready to start this checklist, is to install lithium hydroxide canisters and the stow ordeal.

On panel 8, we want to turn the floodlights to fixed.

Okay, wait a minute, you're going too fast here.

Okay, I'll tell you, I'll go a line at a time and wait for your verification before I go into the next one.

I have panel eight floodlights fixed.

Okay, install LIOH canisters, stow ordeal, floodlights fixed.

Okay, that's the panel eight floodlights.

We're going to take panel five plumbing switches here.

Let's take the surge tank oxygen valve to on.

Search tank O2 to on.

Alright.

Take the main rigs.

And relief valve to both.

That's correct.

And emergency cabin pressure valve to both.

Okay, fancy boy.

That's firm.

And let's go back to page 1-6.

Line 41.

Let's put in a time minus 440.

Man, it's 440.

Floating in the cold dark of the lunar module, Jack Swigert is listening to the man he replaced as command module pilot on the crew of Apollo 13.

Mattingly dictates instructions, and Swigert writes down exactly what he hears.

Pencil in hand, Swigert scavenges scraps of paper from notepads and flight manuals.

If he makes a mistake in copying the procedure down, it won't work and they'll never get home.

Okay, I found good.

Okay.

Now let me give you some

plumbing switches here.

Take the main regs, two,

open it.

I still have nightmares about the fact that Jim Kelly and all of us put together this very complex compressed sequence

that there was no time

to redo.

Read it up in all its complexity by word by word, line by by line.

The thing I didn't take into account when I built that sequence is the fact that the crew was in this

obscure environment.

They're cold and damp.

I mean, they couldn't sleep.

You can't sleep that's cold.

This person may not be fully awake and

100% cognitive skills when this was going on.

It took two and a half hours just to read it up.

Two and a half hours of just reading instructions up to the crew to conquer.

Okay, yeah, I got that.

And they might ask a little question here, and then they need to read the next one.

And it was switches and circuit breakers and comments.

Two and a half hours.

Okay, Jack, it looks like we've closed up the loose ends.

We think we've got all

the little surprises ironed out for you.

I hope so, because tomorrow's examination time.

Roger.

The Earth looms large in the windows of their spacecraft.

Re-entry is now a little over 14 hours away.

Tomorrow, Jack Swager must put his copy of the power-up checklist into action, hoping that the guys on the ground have got it right and that he can successfully resurrect the dead command module.

But for now, it's time for the crew to get some rest, to prepare themselves for the challenges of what will be the last day of the mission of Apollo 13.

Just out of curiosity, uh, what y'all get a readout on uh what the cabin tip was up there?

Yeah, we're we're getting uh 45 to 46 degrees.

Now you see uh why we call it the refrigerator.

Yeah, it's uh kind of a cold winter day up there, isn't it?

Is it snowing in the command module yet?

No, uh, no, not quite.

Uh the windows are in pretty bad shape.

Every window in the command module is covered with water droplets.

Just take a lot of stuff and uh get those uh cleared off.

Roger, understand.

You'll have some time on the beach in Samoa to thaw out after this cold experience.

Yeah, that sounds great.

Apollo Control Houston.

Our countdown clock shows that we're 19 minutes away now from time of separation service module jettison.

For this, Jack Swift.

It's been more than three days since the explosion in the service module, the cylindrical section of the spacecraft below the cone-shaped command module.

No longer able to generate power or be be used as a means of propulsion, it's been a dead weight since the accident.

The crew have so far been unable to see any of the damage directly, but they felt the lurch and heard the bang accompanying the explosion.

They've witnessed the havoc it wreaked with their systems and have watched clouds of debris floating outside.

They cut the service module free.

and crowd around the command module windows to get their first glimpse of the damage.

And they're in for a shock.

And there's one whole side of that spacecraft missing.

Is that right?

Right by the

right by the high gate antenna, the whole panel is blown out almost from the

base to the entrance.

Copy that.

Yeah, it looks like it got to the SCS bell too.

It's really a mess.

Man, that's unbelievable.

The damage area, that whole quarter of the spacecraft where it had blown off,

seemed

much larger than we had experienced.

Thinking back,

we wouldn't have thought a quarter of the spacecraft had blown off.

The damage is much worse than anyone had imagined.

It has ripped off an entire side panel, damaging the bell-shaped nozzle of their main engine right up to the point where the service module was joined to the command module.

And crucially, that section of torn and twisted metal is the part of the service module that has been sitting right next to the command module's heat shield.

As it continues to drift away, a new fear rises.

I was quite worried.

I didn't know what it was before, but when the whole panel was missing, how big was that explosion?

Had that damaged the heat shield, it blew some of those parts of the heat shield away.

So we were really worried because as we went through the atmosphere, the temperatures of the heat shield would be kilopurled 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The heat shield is a honeycomb of fiberglass, stainless steel and resin coating the command module.

It's designed to burn off in layers as the spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere, holding the Inferno safely at bay and away from the astronauts.

But any damage to that shield, even the slightest crack, would allow the fierce heat to creep in, destroying the capsule and incinerating the crew.

This thought is heavy in their minds, but there is nothing they can do.

The Inferno of Reentry lies in wait, just four hours away.

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

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

In the trench with us was series editor Rami Zabar.

Our theme music is by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg.

Technical production is by Tim Heffer.

And our story editor is Catherine Winter of In the Dark at APM Reports.

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 Minnell, and the senior podcast producer is Rachel Simpson.

And thanks to our digital team.

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