_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [72]
Inside Mission Control, flight controllers jumped to their feet.
“What the hell happened?” a voice called out. “The data’s gone haywire!”
Shift manager Sy Liebergot was on it instantly. “Listen up,” he ordered as he stared at the numbers on his monitor. “We’ve lost fuel cells 1 and 2 pressure, and we’ve lost oxygen tank 2 pressure and temperature.”
Apollo 13 was built for deep space and only moments before, astronaut Jack Swigert had flipped a switch to “stir the soup,” to activate tiny mixing paddles inside the liquid oxygen and hydrogen tanks. These super-cold liquids in Apollo 13’s fuel cells kept its three astronauts supplied with breathing air, drinking water, and electricity for their weeklong mission.
Unknown to the astronauts and Mission Control, during the “stirring,” two electrical wires had touched. A spark flashed. Fire raced toward the tank’s oxygen supply. Internal pressure grew. The tank’s dome blew as if it were a shotgun, blasting and shredding everything in its path.
Until that moment, fifty-five hours and fifty-five minutes since Apollo 13 had launched from Cape Canaveral, the third mission to land two men on the moon had been uneventful—even boring. But when the left side of the service module exploded, the astronauts felt a sudden bang! Two hundred thousand miles out, all hell had broken loose. Linked together like a train, the three-unit Apollo 13 assembly was rocked. The service module, the command module, and the lunar lander twisted and rolled through the debris field created from the explosion while inside the command ship, Swigert contacted Mission Control. His words, “Houston, we’ve got a problem,” put everyone on alert. Flight controllers took the temperature of Apollo 13’s life-support systems. Liquid oxygen had to remain at a critical 297 degrees below zero, and the liquid hydrogen tanks even colder, an unbelievable 423 degrees below, if the fuel cells were to continue supplying power and oxygen and water to the astronauts.
Apollo 13 continued its wild flight toward the moon. It looked as if the assembly of space vehicles could be breaking apart. The alarms wailed, the lights flashed while the crew and Mission Control clung to the belief that electrical glitches were causing the problems. No one wanted to believe Apollo 13’s astronauts were in mortal peril as the three quickly moved through their emergency list. They were resetting their cockpit’s switches, adjusting proper instrument settings that had been sent spinning by the explosion, and they were expecting that once they had everything back in its proper place, back on line, all would be well.
They were wrong. When they completed their emergency list resets the alarms still wailed, the lights still flashed, and in the language of pilots everywhere, they told Mission Control, “No joy.”
Apollo 13’s assembly continued to pitch, roll, and moan like a sailing vessel being tossed by high waves. Commander Jim Lovell and his crewmates, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, were not only concerned, they were puzzled. Thirteen minutes had passed since the jolting bang when Lovell looked outside, through a porthole. My God, he thought quietly as he stared at what could be a catastrophe.
“Houston,” Lovell said quietly. “We’re venting something out into the…into space.”
Jim Lovell felt a knot tightening in his stomach—a familiar knot from years of hairy situations in test flight. He was 200,000 miles from home, and the only tank that still held life-sustaining oxygen was draining itself into the black void. He was instantly aware that they had lost any hope of landing on the moon, and the immediate emergency was simply staying alive. His ship was in a circumlunar orbit—a figure-eight flight path around both Earth and the moon—and in this orbit, without a miracle, they would be marooned.
If the crew of Apollo 13 were to survive, experts on the ground had only hours to calculate and engineer a rescue.
Gene Kranz, the no-nonsense flight director who had landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, was in charge. He began by