_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [75]
“Okay, Boss,” Lovell acknowledged.
“And Jim,” Slayton grinned. “According to your mother if we gave you a washing machine to fly, her Jimmy could land it. Is that true?”
“You betcha, Boss,” Lovell laughed. “With or without wings.”
“Get some sleep,” Slayton said, laughing too. “We’ll call if we need you.”
This was Boss Deke Slayton talking. The man they trusted implicitly. Deke’s personal touch did the trick. Soon those cold frogs were snoozing in their icy pond.
More than a billion of Earth’s people listened to every broadcast, camped out in front of their radios and televisions, staying within earshot of every report. Such an extraordinary effort had never before been launched to save three humans. People of every faith prayed. Apollo 13 was headed for a splashdown near American Samoa. There the aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima waited to fish the rescued from the sea.
Since the beginning of the four-day emergency, I had been on the air with few breaks. The phone in our NBC broadcast trailer outside Mission Control rang.
“Jay, this is Russ Tornabene.”
“Hi, Boss,” I smiled. “What’s up?”
“Following the splashdown,” Russ began, “President Nixon will be flying to Mission Control to congratulate the flight controllers, and then on to Honolulu to meet the Apollo 13 astronauts. We want you to join the White House Press Corps in Houston and make the trip with the President.”
“You realize this is going to cut into my splashdown party big time, Boss?”
“Party on the plane,” Russ said, laughing.
Apollo 13 was wrapped snugly in the arms of Earth’s gravity, racing toward reentry as Jack Swigert floated forward from Aquarius to start the “reincarnation” of the command ship Odyssey. He drifted into what had been a familiar spaceship cabin to find a cold and clammy flight deck. Every piece of equipment and instrument was soaked. His fear was that the icy water had seeped into electrical connections, and circuit points were waiting to arc into instant flame once power began to flow.
Swigert moved one switch at a time to return life to his Apollo, and because Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee had given their lives in the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire, every circuit in Odyssey held solid. No arcing, no short circuits. Swigert peered down the connecting tunnel and called to Lovell and Haise, giving them a thumbs-up.
Lovell said a quiet prayer, giving personal thanks too to Apollo 1’s crew, and Swigert switched on the three batteries needed to power the command module during reentry. Two batteries were fully charged but the third was low, so Swigert went back to Aquarius for a power cable. He returned and recharged the weak battery from the lunar module’s power supply.
Astronaut Haise called Mission Control. “What are you guys reading for cabin temperature in the command module?”
“We’re reading 45 to 46 degrees,” Houston replied.
“Now you see why we call it a refrigerator.”
“Uh-huh. Sounds like a cold winter day up there. Is it snowing in the command module yet?”
“No,” Haise grinned. “Not yet.”
“You’ll have some time on the beach in Samoa to thaw out.”
“Sounds great.”
More fighter-pilot banter, good for the nerves as Apollo 13’s astronauts slipped into the final hours. They were getting set to fly a reentry from the moon on Friday morning, April 17, 1970, just over five hours before splashdown. One last time, Lovell fired the lunar module’s small steering thrusters to improve his landing-target accuracy.
An hour later, Swigert separated his command module from the Apollo 13’s battered service module. Lovell snapped several photographs as the section of the ship that had caused all the trouble drifted away. “There’s one whole side of the spacecraft missing,” Lovell reported. “The whole panel is blown out almost from the base of the engine…It’s really a mess.”
Three hours later, just one hour away from punching through the atmosphere, Lovell and Haise moved into the restored command module. They closed