_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [73]
Kranz had barely pulled his team together when the second oxygen tank on Apollo 13 began to fail. It had been damaged in the explosion. The flight director told Lovell and his crew to start powering down the ship and reduce to an absolute minimum what they needed to survive. Then, he took a deep breath and paused for effect. “Two hours from now, unless we come up with something that’s never been done before, those guys are going to be in a derelict ship,” he told his team. “All they’ll have left are three short-life batteries and their reserve oxygen supply. And we can’t use them. They must save them for reentry.”
Deke Slayton stared at Kranz. “If they get that damn far. Let’s get this situation under control,” Slayton shouted. “We’re not losing this crew.”
CapCom Jack Lousma turned for his mike, only to be stopped by the words coming in from Jack Swigert on board Apollo 13. “This is Odyssey, Houston. What’s our oxygen status?”
“Oxygen is slowly going down to zero. We’re starting to think about the LM as a lifeboat.”
“That’s something we’re thinking about, too,” Swigert fired back.
The lunar module named Aquarius was the only chance Lovell, Haise, and Swigert had. They had to shut down the command ship and put it into hibernation, so later on it could be brought back to life for reentry.
“Odyssey, this is Houston. It looks like we’ve got about eighteen minutes left. The last fuel cell is going fast.”
Lovell and Haise pulled themselves through the docking tunnel connecting the two ships. The lunar module was built to land two astronauts on the moon safely and then, after a two-day stay, launch them for a rendezvous with the command ship. Under normal conditions the LM would be used for about forty hours. Somehow those forty-hour systems must be stretched to support not two, but three astronauts for four days, time needed to fly them around the moon and bring them back to Earth.
Swigert stayed behind in the dying Apollo while Lovell and Haise powered up the lunar module. One by one he shut down the Apollo’s systems. When the lights were off, he continued working by flashlight before he joined the others in the LM. Swigert transferred the precise alignment of the Apollo’s guidance platform to a similar guidance system within the lunar module. The guidance platform was a collection of gyroscopes and instruments needed to keep the spaceship aligned precisely with Earth and the moon—to keep Apollo 13’s location known to Mission Control every moment of the flight.
Even though Apollo 13’s crew would now be sustained by the lunar module, the astronauts would need to return to the cold, damp, hibernating command ship for food and bathroom facilities. It promised to be an uncomfortable ride.
Flight director Gene Kranz and his team decided to use the lunar-module descent engine for needed propulsion. They worked out a couple of rocket burns that should bring the Apollo 13’s crew safely home: “We’ll go for a brief burn a few hours from now before they reach the moon. That will give them the free-return trajectory. Then we’ll do a second burn later to drop them into the slot for reentry. That should bring them home in four days.”
Five hours and thirty-five minutes after Apollo 13’s service module blew away its left side, the astronauts fired off the lunar module’s descent rocket for thirty-one seconds. The burn was perfect. “Okay, Houston. Burn’s complete,” Jim Lovell reported. “Now we have to talk about powering down.”
The astronauts had more than enough oxygen to get home, but the carbon dioxide canisters needed to scrub the poison from the air they breathed was another question. They had to find a way to make the canisters in Apollo work in the lunar module for three or four days, or the two big guys would have to throw the little guy overboard.
They had more than enough carbon