Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [37]
Sure enough, at their annual meeting in February, Mutual of Omaha elected me to their board of directors. Board chairman and chief executive officer of the company V. J. Skutt extolled my virtues. “Colonel Aldrin, the great astronaut and young man of good judgment and high principles, will help get our organization off to a flying start in new products and service for the decade ahead,” he told the press.1 Before long, Mr. Skutt would change his tune.
About the same time that I joined Mutual of Omaha, I also joined the board of Amvideo Corporation, a Massachusetts-based parent company of Annapolis CATV, Inc. Cable television was a fledgling industry at that time, with only a handful of stations operating around the country and even fewer with original programming. But I felt sure that the cable television industry held tremendous promise, so I looked at my involvement as an investment in my future.
NASA approved both of my corporate affiliations. The space program restricted astronauts’ outside business interests, tenaciously guarding the image of the program, so NASA’s imprimatur was important to me.
I WAS BACK in Houston on April 11, 1970, for the launch of Apollo 13, carrying astronauts Jim Lovell, John “Jack” Swigert, and Fred Haise to the moon for what was supposed to be America’s third landing on the lunar surface. The first two days of the mission went well, with the crew encountering and overcoming a few problems, but overall the trip was looking good. Some people around Mission Control were regarding it as the smoothest Apollo flight yet.
Then, shortly after 9:00 p.m. on April 13, 1970, about 200,000 miles from Earth, an oxygen tank exploded and the shrapnel punctured a second oxygen tank, causing that tank to fail as well, knocking out the Apollo 13 command module’s electricity heat, lights, and water. With classic understatement, Jack Swigert poignantly reported the emergency: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
The astronauts soon discovered how serious the problem really was; two of their three fuel cells, which were the spacecraft’s prime source of electricity, were lost. One oxygen tank appeared to be completely empty, and the oxygen in the second tank was depleting rapidly. Then, when Jim Lovell looked out the CM’s left window, he saw a truly frightening sight. “We are venting something out into space,” he reported to Houston. “It’s a gas of some sort.” Houston confirmed it was oxygen escaping from the second, and last, oxygen tank.
With the planned landing on the moon aborted, Mission Control frantically worked toward a “successful failure,” to bring the crew back home safely. It was no easy task, as they used the lunar module to power the command module back to Earth. Although the story has often been told, it is still a wonder of training, teamwork, and ingenuity that saved the lives of three brave astronauts.
As soon as the crisis developed, I received a flurry of phone calls. They had plenty of talented experts on hand at Mission Control, so they didn’t need me hanging around, but somebody suggested that Neil Armstrong and I go over to Jim Lovell’s mom’s home to be with her. Maybe we could allay some of her fears.
Neil and I were glad to help, so we went to the home of seventy-three-year-old Blanche Lovell. She welcomed us warmly and invited us in. “It’s so nice of you to come,” she said. “Are you boys part of the space program, too?” We stayed with her and watched the proceedings on television for a while, until some other friends and family members came to stay with her.
Apollo 13 left a lasting impression on America’s space program. Many people regarded bringing back Jim, Jack, and Fred alive as miraculous; from my perspective, it was a tremendous ending for a failed mission. That’s what