Apollo 13: 7. Resurrection

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Well, this is it.

The season two finale of 13 Minutes to the Moon is just about to begin.

I'm Patrick IE, and as a huge fan of 13 Minutes, here's my 13 seconds to tell you about my podcast, also from the BBC World Service.

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It's led to an extraordinary robotic design perfect for space exploration.

That's just one of 30 stories about amazing things humans have learned from the animal kingdom.

Search for 30 animals that made us smarter.

And now, this is what we've all been waiting for.

Apollo 13 is within hours of plunging into Earth's atmosphere.

From the lunar module, Commander Jim Lovell sees the world growing ever larger, ever faster.

I'm looking at the winner now, Jack, and that Earth is whistling in like an IC freight train.

Scattered clouds and oceans begin to stretch out ahead of them.

Their view of the Earth is expanding rapidly.

Lovell, Hayes, and Swiger must now reckon with grave unknowns.

The Command Module Odyssey is the only vehicle built and equipped to get them through the Earth's atmosphere and safely into the ocean.

But for the past four days, they've been forced to leave that spacecraft switched off, completely without power.

Its cabin frozen, dark, dead.

There's no guarantee it can be resurrected, and even if it can, there's another question.

Has the blast damaged Odyssey's heat shield, their only protection against the searing heat of re-entry?

Well, I was quite worried.

It gets up to about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit coming through.

And that's not all they have to contend with.

The spacecraft also has to enter the atmosphere at precisely the right angle.

A little too steep, and Odyssey and the crew will burn up.

Too shallow and they'll be deflected.

skipping off into deep space, lost forever.

I mean, you're coming back from the moon at 35,000 feet per second.

You got to do it just right.

Down in the trench, reentry has been weighing heavily with Flight Dynamics Officer Dave Reed.

Ever since the spacecraft began its return to Earth, something Mission Control hasn't been able to identify has been slowly but surely pushing Apollo 13 off course.

That causes the trajectory to do is slowly shift and shift and shift.

And we would go from, we'd target them and put them right in the middle of the corridor.

Corridor was about a two-degree window, slot you got to get into.

And we'd track them using these Doppler radar that we were using.

And you'd see them and you'd say, okay,

you're just a little bit shallow.

We're going to give you a short maneuver and break you out of that, which we did.

Put them back in the center of the corridor.

Maybe two hours, three hours, five, six hours later, we'd track them and, hey, wait a minute.

That's not where they should be.

something is pushing that spacecraft that came to really be a nail biter at re-entry

from the bbc world service this is 13 minutes to the moon season two

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, Harrison, 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 spacecraft missing.

That's the end right there.

Episode 7.

Resurrection.

Aquarius Houston, your attitude looks real good.

We will give you a mark at 10 minutes to the burn, which is in 28 seconds.

Okay.

Five hours before Apollo 13's scheduled time of re-entry, Capcom Joe Cohen gives the crew the go-ahead for one final critical maneuver to adjust for the troubling drift in their trajectory and to put them back on target.

Gene Krantz returns as flight director.

In the trench, there's Dave Reed, call sign Fido and Retro Fire Officer Chuck Dietrich.

Retrofire

Go ahead, I froze the maneuvers.

Okay.

Dietrich and Reed have devised this burn.

Like the previous corrective maneuver the day before, the crew once again have to execute it manually.

But at this point, long starved of sleep, they are deeply fatigued and there is the real risk of pilot error.

Flight controller Hal Loden, call sign control, is keenly monitoring the performance of the lunar module's attitude control jets, which are providing the thrust for this course adjustment.

How are you looking, control?

Looking fine, fly.

It was a very short maneuver, something like 20 seconds or so.

As I recall, to get into the proper attitude, he had to use the Earth as a celestial body to make that

alignment.

We're burning, Raj.

Did it not occur to you in Mission Control that this might be a worryingly risky maneuver?

Looking good.

Raj.

Well, yeah, you're depending on the tracking information you've got.

You're depending on the systems to have aligned you to where you wanted to be.

Now you couple that with the fact that we're doing it manually.

You know, yeah, you pucker a little bit more, but you still have a confidence that, yeah, this is going to, you know, the fact that we had gotten him that far, I was feeling pretty good.

The 23-second burn comes to an end.

Good show, Aquarius.

Where's Lee good now, Joe?

Roger.

Flight fight him.

He's good right where he is.

Aquarius Houston, you're good right where you are.

Okay, that's it.

They're back on target, at least for the time being.

Two and a half hours before re-entry.

It's time to find out if Odyssey can be powered up and brought back to life.

The astronaut now firmly in the spotlight is Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert.

Ecom flight controller John Aaron,

he's on console for Apollo 13's return.

For four days and nights, he's been at the forefront of devising the scheme that Swigert now has to put into practice to once again get electricity flowing through all its essential systems and keep those systems running on the precious, limited reserves of energy in Odyssey's three re-entry batteries.

Swigert must follow page upon page of step-by-step instructions describing seemingly countless circuit breakers and switch throws, all the while floating in the cold and in the dark.

We sent Jack Swigert

down in the cold command module, which was about 35, 38 degrees, which is the same temperature as the refrigerator you keep your milk in,

and start doing this sequence.

So

the nightmare I have is that we built

the perfect sequence, handed it off to somebody who had any sleep to go sit in the refrigerator and do it with a flashlight.

And we depended on it.

Aquarius Houston.

Go ahead.

Okay, uh you're go to start uh powering up the command module.

Right oh, we're starting now.

Okay.

It's worth remembering the extraordinary circumstances of Odyssey's resurrection.

If this were a normal mission, the service module would still be attached and its fuel cells would be powering Odyssey until just half an hour before re-entry.

As it is, the wrecked service module has already been jettisoned, but three hours of power are still needed to run a host of functions, from the command module's guidance system to the activation of its parachutes as it plummets towards the Pacific Ocean.

Not only did we want to do that with a limited amount of power usage, because the only power left was in the the re-entry batteries, but would it even work, you know, because it had been turned off.

Senior Flight Dynamics Officer Jerry Bostick.

If we had asked for that capability before the flight, they said we want to have the capability to turn the command module off during flight, they would have kicked us out of the room.

They said, you know, that's stupid.

Why would you ever want to do that?

You know, so there was that was my biggest concern, and I think the biggest concern among other flight controllers is: are we really going to be able to turn that thing back on and it's going to work?

I've got Fred up there with Jack now helping to power up the CM, and I'm

staying down at Good Old Aquarium.

Understand, Jim.

Fred Hayes has floated through the short tunnel connecting the two vehicles.

He doesn't like what he sees.

The chilled interior of the command module is dripping with condensation.

And of course water was collecting everywhere.

Globs of water.

They're sort of shimmering a little bit with a little bit of vibration.

We had to get out a towel to wipe off the instrument panel.

See the instruments.

And we knew there was probably water behind the panel and everything.

With the very real risk that this condensation could spark an electrical fire, Jack Swiger recommends they take a cautious approach with the multitude of circuit breakers in front of them.

He suggested we just push in starting at one row and push in six and stop for a moment or two.

And he'd call out when we started and stopped and wait to see if we smelled any insulation burning.

We're in about a short of some kind.

But anyway,

that worked because we did not suffer any electric shorts in that period to get it powered up.

It's amazing.

It's absolutely friggin' amazing.

You gotta hand it to the crew.

They didn't complain.

They just did it.

In a way, the flight controllers in mission control are also in the dark.

Aaron's plan called for Odyssey's communications systems to be kept off until late into the procedure to save battery power.

So they haven't been able to follow the astronauts' progress.

Flight Director Gene Krantz waits anxiously for word of first contact.

Reported CSMAOS.

Raj, our flight controllers, honeysuckle reports CSM-AOS.

AOS.

Acquisition of signal from one of NASA's tracking stations in Australia.

All we need now on the network is some data.

Probably.

This is telemetry data that will stream onto the flight controller's consoles and reveal if the spacecraft's systems are working as they should.

Bang, the swimmer came on.

And there it was.

Everybody soaked that up to see how well Jack had done.

And Jack had done perfect.

Got date e-com, busts look good, AC is good.

Work up 14 amps, huh?

Roger that.

Aaron and his backroom support Jim Kelly are relieved to see just what they'd prayed for.

Electricity is coursing through Odyssey's systems once again.

Aaron passes the good news to Krantz.

Why do you know we got a blast today?

It looks good.

Right, main bus 29 volts.

Roger, what a relief it was.

This is Jim Kelly, electrical power specialist and Aaron's partner in shaping the power up plan.

The voltages on my perspective was good.

The ECS guys, they reported that their systems were good, the oxygen was good, the CO2 level was good, the flow rate was good.

Everything we saw when we got power gave us a positive indication that things were on the right track.

You looked beautiful.

For the first time in four days, Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert is able to call down to mission control from his ship, Odyssey.

last fair.

Ferrim 74 coming down.

Jack was probably the most proficient command module pilot in the astronaut office.

That's Charlie Duke, one of the Apollo 13 backup crew, just as Swigert had been until he was promoted to the prime crew just three days before liftoff.

Now, Hollywood's account of the mission portrayed Swigert as unprepared for the flight, but Duke says that just isn't true.

He had worked for North American Rockwell as a test pilot in the early days of Apollo.

We each had certain systems, certain things that we were responsible for.

And he was the primary guy on the command service module since he'd worked on it

before he became an astronaut.

He developed all the emergency procedures that ended up in the flight manual.

So he was really proficient.

Apollo Apollo 13, the movie made him look like a not really qualified, but that was drama for the movie.

He was really good.

Jack, you can go ahead with the IMU and optics power-up over.

Right, it didn't work.

Go soon.

Okay.

Jack Swigert is now reviving the command module's all-important navigation instruments and IMU, its guidance platform.

The crew will be abandoning the lunar module and cutting Aquarius free about an hour before they hit the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere, so their lives now depend on being able to revive Odyssey's guidance system.

Getting the guidance platform powered up is critical, but just as crucial is getting it aligned precisely.

For that, Swigat has to sight three known stars through Odyssey's sextant and punch their positions into the system using the onboard computer.

But But it's not going to plan.

With less than two hours to go, Capcom Joe Kirwin is getting nervous.

His problem was that the lunar module was still attached and there was sunlight reflecting off the lunar module into the optics and so he had a blurry vision.

It was hard for him to see constellations.

and he kept getting the wrong answer.

Swigert calls down for help.

He asks Kirwin to recommend stars that he might have a better chance of seeing.

The alignment of that guidance platform is absolutely critical to the entry procedure.

Without it, it's not going to go well.

Well, without it, you'd have to go by eyeball.

And if you went by eyeball, you might be several degrees off in your attitude

at the entry interface.

And therefore, you might have a tendency to skip or dive in or, you know, just be wrong.

So I'm sitting there at the Capcom console, looking up at Kranz, who is standing at his console, and time is moving on, and Jack is sweating it out, and I'm looking up here, and Gene just didn't say a word, he just sort of,

like that, waved his hand down at me, saying, Give him a little time, give him a little time.

And I remember, I'm reading from your oral history.

I mean, you say that you were sweating bullets during that alignment.

Well, I thought it was extremely important, and I thought, what if he doesn't get it?

Come on, what if we try to get it so long that we miss some other step or get too close to re-entering the atmosphere?

But I was a good Capcom, I didn't say a word.

After what seems like an eternity, Swigert shouts his good news through the static.

So we were set with a good ship again, miraculously after

four days of abuse.

As soon as Odyssey has its bearings, Lovell announces he's making the lunar module's final maneuver.

Aquarius' job is almost done.

Lovell fires the LEMS attitude control jets to put them into the right orientation so it can be cut loose.

When Apollo 13 launched seven days ago, Lovell could never have imagined he would be two hours from Earth but still in Aquarius' cabin.

Had the mission gone to plan, Aquarius would have taken him and Fred Hayes down to the moon, and after transporting them back to Odyssey, it would have been jettisoned in lunar orbit.

Instead, Aquarius was repurposed as a lifeboat, and it's kept them alive for four days.

Cold, cramped and uncomfortable, it might have been, but the power and water held out, and the LEM's propulsion and flight control systems successfully got them through maneuvers it was never designed to perform.

But now, as the gravitational pull of the Earth continues to accelerate them, Aquarius ceases to be a life-saving refuge and instead becomes a threat to their survival.

Charlie Duke.

Nobody had ever brought a lunar module back before from the moon.

And what is this vehicle going to do when it hits the atmosphere?

Is it going to cartwheel back into the command module?

We didn't know.

So the more distance the crew can put between the vehicles at separation, the safer they'll be at re-entry.

But there's a problem.

The standard means of cutting the limb free aren't available to them.

The normal way you separated from the limb was you use the thrusters on the service module to back away.

And of course, the service module was gone, and so we actually

had to get rid of it in an unusual way.

The unorthodox plan had been hatched in the trench a couple of days earlier by retrofire officer Chuck Dietrich.

Dietrich thought back to Apollo 10, the dress rehearsal mission for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's moon landing.

When the time came for the Apollo 10 crew to jettison their lunar module, they hadn't let all the air out of the tunnel between the lander and the command module as they were supposed to.

So at separation, the lunar module received a shove from that air rushing and escaping into space, like a cork popping from a champagne bottle.

So anyway, I remember the pressure in the tunnel during the lunar module jettison on Apollo 10 pushed the two vehicles apart.

So why don't we use that

energy to separate the lunar module from the command module an hour and 10 minutes before re-entry?

It was just fortunate we had that, we thought about that.

It's now time for Jim Lovell to finally abandon the spacecraft he had been hoping to fly to the surface of the moon.

Okay, Houston, Aquarius, I'm at the

left of attitude and I'm planning on failing out.

Okay,

can't think of a better idea, Jim.

We finally got everything square away.

We brought all our gear back into the command module.

Fred took some netting that we had that was sort of protecting the electronic stuff over on on his side.

It's a souvenir.

I took the optical sight out of my side back in as a souvenir.

And then we came through, got ready to go, and then closed the hatch.

Now sealed behind Odyssey's hatch, the crew begins the job of evacuating most of the air from the short tunnel on the other side.

Odyssey Houston.

Verify that the hatch is secured and that you are venting the tunnel over.

Now that's verified.

We have a delta P of 2.8.

Real good, real good.

They have to get the pressure in the tunnel exactly right.

Too much, and its release will damage Odyssey's hatch.

Too little, and Aquarius will be dangerously close when both vehicles re-enter.

Flight director Gene Krantz does a final check with his flight control team.

Okay, our flight controller is going around the horn to separate from the limb here.

Retro?

Go!

Fight on, go, guide us, go, control, go, Telomium.

Go.

GNC?

go, okay, e-comm, go,

surgeon, go, punch off early, Raj, Inco, how about you?

We're go-flight, Raj.

Capcom, we're clear to separate at the crew's discretion.

Ecom recovery, hopefully.

Houston, uh, we just had a formal uh goal for leave out your Roger.

Convenience, over.

Through the static, mission control hears Swigert countdown to the release of the bolt holding Aquarius to Odyssey.

The crew brace themselves.

That gave a jolt right there.

Okay, happy dead.

And that cast a limb off to the side directionally from the entry path.

So when we kicked it off, it offered some separation.

Because you didn't want it to run into you at during re-entry.

Right.

Hayes watches Aquarius recede, now on its own path to re-enter the Earth's Earth's atmosphere.

A journey that must end in its certain destruction.

In Mission Control, Capcom Joe Kirwin speaks for everyone.

Farewell Aquarius and we thank you.

What was that moment like for you, Fred?

This is your ship.

This is your lunar module, and it has served you well the last few days.

Well, you know, it done its job.

I was proud of it.

The lunar module proved itself.

There were theories about can you use the lunar module to get back home in case something happened, but had never been thoroughly investigated.

This proved it was possible.

It had served in a different way than we had planned, obviously, but it held together the whole way and

got us to where we were.

She was a good ship, Lem7,

Aquarius.

Sealed once again inside the command module, their survival now depends on Odyssey.

They are just 22,000 kilometers from Earth and closing faster every second.

In little more than an hour's time, they'll be streaking into the upper layers of the atmosphere and facing their final reckoning.

Around the world, television networks have begun their coverage of Apollo 13's return.

The media had paid little attention to the mission until the explosion.

But now, millions of people are watching and listening.

In 1970, science presenter James Burke is the face and voice of BBC's live Apollo 13 special.

The focus turns to what could still go wrong.

Meanwhile, the crew at the moment are going through the last preparations.

It's been a very tense period, and one of the few men on Earth who knows what it's like to go through that, to come back from lunar orbit and head in towards the Earth with your fingers crossed that the heat shield is going to work and you're on the right attitude is Neil Armstrong.

And he talked recently to newsmen about what it was like up there and what he thought of the crew and the state of the mission as it was at this moment.

If you were in the spacecraft during re-entry which would you regard as the most critical moment of all from the point of view of the commander and the crew?

The parachutes.

I think that's unquestionably the

the most serious time point in the entry from my point of view.

And the reason is when the parachutes don't come out, you're rather short of alternatives and considerably short of time.

In mission control, nobody's laughing.

You're very

anxious and tense to make sure you've got everything all zipped up.

And all bunches zipped up, there's nothing left to do and you just got to sit there and watch the quad.

And you got about our dentist.

The final thing I remember about this mission was this re-entry period.

Flight Director Gene Krantz speaking to the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in 1999.

It finally comes time to express our feelings.

And the entire world's listening, and Mission Control isn't going to admit we're emotional.

And the rookie on board the spacecraft, Jack Swaggert, finally comes down.

He says, I know all of us here want to thank all you guys down there for the very fine job you did.

And that sort of broke the ice.

That's a firm joke.

We got a few Adamboys from Lovell and Hayes.

Tell you, we all had a good time doing it.

There are now just 18 minutes left before the ultimate test of Odyssey's endurance.

Less than 5,000 kilometers to go, their velocity is 8 kilometers per second and climbing.

The cone-shaped craft is hurtling with its blunt base forwards.

The crew's windows face backwards so they cannot see where they're heading, only where they've come from.

And they can see the moon, now small and distant.

Joe Kirwin updates them on how much battery power they've got left.

Odyssey Houston, just for your information, it looks as though Battery C will deplete around main shoot time.

That's expected.

You've got plenty of amp hours in the other batteries.

Back in the BBC television studio, the anchor Cliff Mitchellmore sketches out the re-entry timetable and arrangements for the crew's recovery from the South Pacific.

Now looking forward very quickly to the re-entry, the timings to watch for 8.35 as they start the re-entry sequence in motion and then at 1854, that's six minutes to seven, the crucial moment at a 25,000 miles an hour when the command module meets the Earth's atmosphere at 400,000 feet up over New Zealand.

Then through the clouds, splashed down eventually by,

we hope by the deck of the waiting ship Iwo Jimo, which is there with its helicopters on board and has been standing by since dawn.

We sincerely hope that on this program you will hear the band play, you will see the red carpet down and you will see those three remarkable men walk along it.

That's our hope.

Eight minutes to go.

And the exchanges between the crew and mission control take on a tone of reassurance.

Joe Kirwin, who's a doctor doctor as well as an astronaut, lets them know that their guidance system is working fine.

Out of C.

Houston, your discy is doing all the right things that she and N is go over.

Okay, thank you.

Joe Kirwin, the doctor, was he was sitting there as a capsule communicator, and they were exchanging kind of tidbits.

And one of the crewmen said, You have a good bedside batter, Joe.

Say again, Jack.

You have a good bedside banner.

He said, Joe, you had a wonderful bedside banner.

That's the nicest thing anybody's ever said.

Just five minutes now remain, and Gene Krantz asks for a final status check from his team.

Okay, I'll flight controllers.

Last time around the horn here.

How you looking, GNC?

Things good, Flight.

They're about 26 degrees off the O5G pitch.

How about you, Ecom?

Looks good here, Flight.

Raj, how about you, guidance?

Go, Flynn.

Title, go.

Raj, retro?

Tom, go, fly.

Okay, Capcom, looking all good here.

Odyssey Houston over.

Go ahead.

Okay, we just had one last time around the room, and everybody says you're looking great.

Thank you.

The air-to-ground conversations are about to become impossible.

When Odyssey hurtles into the upper atmosphere, its forward-facing blunt ends will rapidly heat up to temperatures close to those at the surface of the Sun.

If the capsule's heat shield is undamaged, the crew will be kept safe.

If not, the relentless toil of the last four days will have been for nothing.

But either way, they'll be in communications blackout.

The fierce heat will charge the air around them, creating a wall of fire through which radio signals cannot pass.

For three minutes, Mission Control will know nothing of the fate of the crew and their capsule.

There's one final message from Joe Kirwin, telling Lovell and his crew when they should expect loss of radio contacts with the outside world.

Odyssey Houston over.

Go ahead.

Okay, LOS in a minute or a minute and a half.

At entry attitude, we'd like Omni Charlie.

And welcome home, over.

Thank you.

Velocity now rating 35,646 feet per second, range to go 1,900 to 61 nautical miles.

I was feeling pretty good.

Flight controller Hal Loden.

And I think the control center in general was feeling pretty good.

We only had one more critical thing to get through.

Re-entry.

Yeah, it's the most critical of all.

But I don't think there was any apprehension that this was...

not going to be successful.

But there is anxiety in the trench where the team have been tracking and shaping Apollo 13's trajectory.

In the final hours, Odyssey's flight path has continued to shallow.

The risk that they might skip off the atmosphere and be lost in space looms large in their imagination.

Retro Fire Officer Chuck Dietrich.

The thing that really bothered me, you know, we did a mid-course correction to get right at six and a half degree flight path angle.

And now we're down to 6.2, and that really kind of made me a little nervous.

We had never flown a trajectory that shallow before.

We're now coming to the moment, the last moments of Apollo 13 as it comes in, as it begins its re-entry.

The best thing we can do now is just to listen and hope.

The last few seconds down to re-entry.

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

Finally,

you know, they hit the interface.

They hit the entry interface

and blackout starts.

Calm goes off.

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

Inside Odyssey, Jim Lovell can begin to feel their speed breaking just a little.

As we got into the very high end of the atmosphere, we could feel in our bodies that we were slowing down.

Now it wasn't exactly, you know, 1G yet, but just basically, but then it sort of build up and build up and build up.

And of course, I told my two companions what to expect since I had been there before, but there wasn't much more we could do now.

It powered up the computer and the guidance system.

It now knew

where we were and it knew where we were supposed to go.

And therefore, all we had to do was wait.

As for Lunar Module Pilot Fred Hayes.

For me, in the right couch position,

I had nothing to do, really, during entry except look out the window and enjoy the view.

Jack was in the commander's seat at that time, and he and Jim were worrying about the path and trajectory and the control of the vehicle, that kind of sort of thing.

So I just enjoyed the view, and it was a nice view because when you're coming in blunt, heat shield first,

your view out the window is looking backwards.

So you're looking at the fiery tail, some particles occasionally flicking out in the stream and as it rolls, you can see a little curled cue of this.

You have a really nice view of the

entry.

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

And we'll only know whether or not that heat shield was damaged by the explosion three days ago.

When they come out of Radio Blackout, just over two minutes.

At her home in Houston, Marilyn Lovell is waiting nervously for the blackout to finish.

She's following her husband's return to Earth on television, surrounded by friends and family.

And she's clutching her youngest son close.

It was wall-to-wall people.

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

In fact, I remember holding Jeff, the little guy, and I held him so tight that he screamed.

He said, I'm squeezing him too tight.

A few miles away in the mission operations control room, all of the Apollo 13 flight directors are clustered around Gene Krantz, and Jerry Griffin is among them.

Blackout occurred at a very predictable time.

It was depending on the on the velocity and the top of the atmosphere when they hit it.

We could count down to a second when it would start.

We could also calculate to a second when it would end.

The job of calculating the end of blackout belongs to Retrofire Officer Chuck Dietrich.

He updates Kranz.

Right, Retro, we ought to be out of blackout in about 30 seconds before I'll try shortly.

The mission control team won't receive the signal directly from the capsule.

It will be picked up by one of four tracking aircraft flying high in the sky above the South Pacific and then relayed to Houston.

Silence falls in the control room.

There isn't any noise in here.

You hear the electronics, you hear the hum of the air conditioning occasionally.

In those days we used to smoke a lot.

Somebody will hear a rasp of the Zippo lighter as somebody lights up a cigarette and you drink the final cold coffee and stale soda that's been there.

Less than 10 seconds now, we will attempt to

contact Apollo 13 through one of of the Oriah aircraft continuing to monitor this Apollo control Houston.

And each controller during Blackout, this is an intensely lonely period because you're left, the crews on their own and they're left with the data that you gave them, maneuver data, attitude information, all of these kinds of things.

And each controller is going back through everything they did during the mission and was I right?

And that's the only question in their mind.

No one is feeling that responsibility more than Chuck Dietrich and Dave Reed in the trench.

The kicker for Chuck and myself was that that last maneuver that we gave them was based on the best vector that I had,

and he the best maneuver he could come up with to put them in the middle of the corridor.

And they should have had a re-entry blackout of only three minutes.

That's not what happened.

On board the tracking aircraft, the crew listened through the static for any sign of Apollo 13.

Okay, Jimmy.

Jimmy coming out of blackout now.

Messenger?

Can you see him?

We got to the end and

nothing.

And that had never happened to us before.

That the blackout didn't end when it was supposed to.

Well,

you don't think much about it until it gets, you know, up to 10 seconds or 15 seconds.

You can just sense at that point the smiles turning not into frowns, but into solemn expressions on the part of guys in the in mission control.

Too soon to celebrate.

Network, any reports of our eye acquisition yet?

Not at the satellite.

Okay.

Then it gets up to a minute.

Well,

then you start doing soul searching.

Soul searching.

What's happened?

For the first time in this mission,

there is the first little bit of doubt that's coming into this room that something happened and the crew didn't make it.

We did everything we could, I think.

What could we have missed?

Was the trajectory so shallow that they're skipped?

Now this is putting a lot of gravity down there in the trench because Truck and I knew we were the last two people to do anything hands-on with that spacecraft.

If we had given the wrong maneuver, it's going to be all on our shoulders.

Did the heat shield crack?

You start thinking

all those things.

Networking all RIA contact yet?

Not a disappointment.

You've got communications with the Orient?

That's affirmative.

Okay.

It was so quiet.

You could hear a pin drop because it was so tense,

very tense.

And I

was really worried at that time.

I thought, my gosh, you know, we have performed all these miracles.

And now maybe we have lost them.

So that was one of the most depressing times, I think, in my life.

I thought, oh, my gosh, this can't be happening.

We were one minute and 27 seconds since we should have heard from the crew before we finally get a call.

Mariah 4 is AOS, Mike.

Roger.

Cap Common, why don't you try and give him a call?

Odyssey Houston standing by over.

Okay, Cole.

Okay, Joe, from Swire.

Okay, we read you, Jack.

And the smiles all came back, okay.

I'll tell you, it saved the floor from crashing through the entire building because there was so much gravity around us and the tranche.

I said, oh my gosh gracious, it worked.

We're looking at the weather on TV and it looks just as advertised real good.

But there is one last uncertainty.

The deployment of two small parachutes called drogues to be followed by the unfurling of the three main parachute canopies.

Less than two minutes now from time of drogue deployment.

That drogue deployment that he's talking about is the point at which the very small parachutes come out that then drag up the main parachutes.

There was a little bit of a shock at a point when you got about 60,000 feet, I think, where the drogues came out.

There's a rumble of that, hatches blowing off, and then the chutes, and you could watch them.

You're looking right where they're streaming out.

And of course, a little jerk when the drogues deployed to stabilize the capsule as you got into the thicker air.

A report of two good drogues coming up now for main chutes.

Then of course there was the bigger jolts of the main shoots coming out.

There they are, there they are.

They made it.

Mission control erupts.

Odd to see you, sin.

We show you on the mains.

It really looks great.

And the intensity of this motional release is so great that I think every controller is silently crying.

You just hear a whoop, and then you're back down to business again.

I've got you on television, television babe you see the beautiful very large parachutes with the command module hanging under them gently cut off floating down and that looked beautiful you guys you bet

and you know we were sitting there watching video live

from the deck of the ship that was pretty

looky there

beautiful sight retro chuck dietrich we were all happy We've been through a lot of stuff for the last couple of days.

So when the shoes came out, we saw them on the shoots, we all kind of said, man, this is going to be better.

And better than their wildest hopes.

The trench had put Odyssey on course for one of the most accurate splashdowns in the history of the Apollo program.

A report from the Iwo Jima that Apollo 13 is descending at a point four miles due south of the ship.

Hey, recovery retro.

Go with the last.

Go, retro.

Close enough, babe.

I'll buy you a beer on that.

Right to that.

Photo one observed splash down at this time.

On to take up parody.

Another cheer in the control room as we had splashed down.

Photo one's away, didn't try the receiver.

Yeah, it was a very nice feeling, really, now that we were back on the water.

Yeah, that felt very good because the command module was still cold.

Even after entry, when they opened the hatch,

a frosty cloud of air came out of the hatch because we were in the South Pacific by the Samoan Islands, so it was a nice warm environment climbing out.

I felt obviously relieved that we had made it

and still not feeling super chipper with the

bladder infection, but otherwise was certainly able to climb out of the capsule and get into the raft.

I was worried about Fred Hayes, so I got Fred on the helicopter first and then I got Jack second.

And then, you know, the commanders of sinking ships are always the last to leave you know

and I was bound to determine I was going to be the last guy to leave this thing so I was I was the last guy to go and for Marilyn Lovell the sight of her husband Jim Lovell climbing out of Odyssey throws the family home into uproar everyone was screaming

it was fantastic

the probably the biggest relief I've ever had in my life.

I believe not only did it bring tears to a lot of people's eyes in our home, but after knowing about NASA and the men sitting down and wiping the tears from their eyes, you know how tense all that was.

Flight controller Hal Loden.

I remember...

Gene Kranz, he actually had tears in his eyes.

He was so emotional.

And I did too.

I think there are a lot of people.

You know, I'm getting emotional talking about it now.

I can't explain it.

I'm sorry.

My prayers were answered.

And I'm sure there are a lot of people's prayers were answered, not just in the control room, but around the world.

In the control room, the splashdown celebrations begin in traditional style.

Our celebration always started with cigars, and they got to be good cigars because nobody in mission control is going to smoke a bummer.

And we had some darn fine cigars.

There were about 700 that we had acquired.

And it not only went through mission control teams, our back rooms, program offices, went to factories, the laboratories, everybody had their mission cigar to light up at the same same time that we did.

And

it was really spectacular.

Anyway, once you get the cigars lit up, there's all the Attaboys and celebration mission control.

Then you unlock the doors because they'd been locked.

And the real heroes start pouring in at that time because these are the folks in the back rooms who came up with the answers we needed when we needed them.

Among them is Jim Kelly, who'd worked side by side with John Aaron to do the impossible with Odyssey's meager power reserves.

I'm happy I was there,

but in terms of being a hero, no.

One of my youngest kids one day called me a hero, and I looked at her and I says, no, we weren't heroes.

We're ordinary people with a basic understanding.

A little bit of physics, a little bit of math, a little bit of science.

And that's all we had.

Just normal people.

As for John Aaron, he tells me he had only one cigar and then went straight home to bed.

And I'm probably not the only one that did that.

I went home and went to bed.

I was totally exhausted.

But, you know, a couple of days I went back to work and

we started redesigning this command module.

and service module to see, okay,

how can we make it better?

And

we redid the whole architecture of the fuel cell system and we added two extra tanks, put another hydrogen tank, put another oxygen tank, put a 400-amp-hour battery in there.

And we were on our way back to the moon on Paul 14 in nine months.

It's just amazing.

That was back in the days when you could really do something.

The flight of Apollo 13 was the most extraordinary episode in the history of human spaceflight.

A rescue against all the odds, a victory snatched from the jaws of almost certain defeat.

A crew delivered from a moment of disaster across hundreds of thousands of miles of space and returned safely home again.

There is so much that we might learn from the people who flew and saved that mission, even today,

perhaps especially today.

In the face of crisis, no matter how apparently insurmountable, we must act.

We must do so urgently and decisively.

We must delegate authority, defer to expertise and understand where in the system that expertise truly lies.

We must know when to lead and when to get out of the way.

We must know when to follow, but learn to take full ownership of the tasks that fall to us.

We must act together across whatever distance, so that the whole becomes far greater than the sum of the parts.

And we must never, ever give up.

no matter how impossible the future might suddenly appear, because within all of that lies a kernel of hope and determination that might grow into something much more.

Senior Flight Controller Jerry Bostick was with NASA from the dawn of the United States human spaceflight program.

For him, The saving of Apollo 13 offers us a roadmap for tackling any kind of crisis, be it in space, on Earth, or in our own lives.

What's the secret, Jerry?

You know, if you're studying this now and you're trying to explain how you as a team of people get this crew back from what looks like certain death,

what is the secret?

Well, it's a step-by-step sequence.

And I try to explain that to especially young people.

You know, you're going to face problems in life that you may not be able to see the end solution, but you know what the desired solution is.

So you just take it one step at a time to head in that direction.

And don't ever lose sight of the end goal, but don't try to get there immediately.

Just take it one step at a time and have confidence in yourself.

And if you're working with a team, you know, obviously you have to have confidence in the whole team.

But rely on your teammates.

Don't try to do everything yourself.

John Aaron too is proud proud of his part in the rescue of Apollo 13 and the success of the other Apollo flights which came before and after.

The Apollo missions came thick and fast.

It was just four years between the first flight around the Moon on Apollo 8 to the final lunar landing of Apollo 17 in 1972.

It's no wonder John Aaron could only fully comprehend the enormity of these achievements years later.

We didn't get a chance to look back and reflect on it.

It was terrible.

They didn't even keep anything.

I didn't even keep the piece of paper that this power profile was sketched out on.

Goodness.

I guess we were just young and naive and thought this space program was just going to go on forever like this.

The world doesn't work that way.

Jerry Bostick,

I asked a question one time about,

you know, did you have time to

really enjoy the accomplishments that we're doing?

And I said, well, the answer is no.

I always compared it like

fine wine was being served to this table when we were chugglegging it.

Because as soon as we land, it was balls out to do the next one.

And then there's Jim Lovell, the pilot on the first mission to fly to the moon and the commander of that extraordinary flight in April 1970.

Jim, after all this time, we're 50 years on from that mission.

What has it come to mean to you in your life, the mission of Apollo 13?

Well, in reality, I think when I look back on my life, I can leave it with a sense of achievement.

Look at it in a sense that, hey,

inadvertently perhaps, somehow I happened to step into the right spot at the right time and be thankful that I could look back and say, hey, I did accomplish a little bit something unusual.

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

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

Making sure that we were dead center in the re-entry corridor was series editor Rami Sabah.

Our theme music was by Hun Zimmer and Christian Lundberg.

Technical production was by Giles Aspen.

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

Now, this being the final episode of the season, there are many people to thank.

There's NASA and the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for the archive material, and Simon Plumpton, Issa Sang and Ben Feist for helping us navigate through the mission loops.

We're grateful too for technical advice from Johannes Kempenen and David Woods of the Apollo 13 Flight Journal.

We also owe a great many thanks to William Reeves for putting us in contact with so many of his former colleagues in mission control.

But our biggest thanks go to you, our listeners.

It's been wonderful to learn how many of you have been inspired by the story of Apollo 13 and by the people who've wrestled triumph from disaster.

And of course, you can go back and binge on both seasons at bbcworldservice.com slash 13 minutes, where you'll find our latest film.

It's about the agonising wait during the blackout period told by the people at the heart of Apollo 13's rescue.

Thanks to our digital team, Stephanie Constantine, Ellen Sang, Jack Burgess, Catherine Campbell and digital editor Anna Doble.

Thanks also to World Service podcast editor John Mannell and the senior podcast producer Rachel Simpson.

We always love hearing from you and reading your reviews.

It's just been amazing to see how many of you have found inspiration in these Apollo stories.

So please do keep them coming and spread the word using our hashtag 13 MinutesToTheMoon.

And finally, for all of us now caught in the grip of COVID-19, but especially for my colleagues and my friends across the world fighting this disease day in, day out on the front lines, this episode, this series is dedicated to you.

We'll get through this thing.

together, one crisis at a time, and we'll keep working the problem until we get to the other side.

And I'll see you all at Splashdown.

A world of wonder.

That's just crazy to try and do something as dangerous as that around the moon.

Moments of joy.

What you should see now is a cloud.

No way.

A world of drama.

We don't have to be afraid now.

Look at us.

And real life, too.

This is maybe the first leaf of evidence we have in almost 48 years.

Amazing stories.

They hugged me and they started crying.

They squeezed me and they were crying.

From all over our sphere.

There's nothing that you can't do in this world if you set your mind to it.

Wherever you want them, they're here.

Podcasts from the BBC World Service.

Search for BBC World Service wherever you get your podcasts.

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Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunselmann, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

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