A Little Detail on One Big Event in Space That Happened Just Before I Was Born – The Apollo 13 Mission That Almost Led To Death of the Three NASA Astronauts On Board

     Of course, Apollo was the famous American space project of 

manned rockets from NASA (National Aeronautical and Space Administration),and Apollo’s mission seemed to put American astronauts in orbit, or to the moon. It was, from reading American history and studying it as a teenager, a prelude to a new swath of space missions from NASA—called The Space Shuttle.

   It is pretty admirable and felicitous that Apollo 11, of course,

was the most-famous of the Apollo space missions—urged on by President John F. Kennedy at the time. It was that mission that involved a successful first moon landing of an American spaceship, and where astronaut Neil Armstrong walked from an already-landed LEM (or lunar extraction module) into the partial gravity milieu of the

moon with his timeless quote on his own comlink – “one step for

man….one giant leap for mankind.” All of the astronauts then went from the moon to the earth and re-entry to the atmosphere and splashdown went almost textbook perfect with virtually no problems. So it took watching the film “Apollo 13” (1995) to figure out what would be called one of the most unorthodox missions than any other Apollo mission in NASA’s space history.

    Now, Apollo 13 was going to get its shot like what Apollo 11 did---another shot to the moon. But there would be no Armstrong on the flight – three new astronauts joined up for this mission. They would be Fred Haise, Jimmy Swigert, and Jim Lovell. Ken Mattingly was going to be the lunar module pilot but regrettably contracted the measles indirectly with no chance of being protected so he was kicked off the primary crew and Jimmy Swigert came in Ken’s place.

    On April 11, 1970, at 1:13 p.m., the rocket blasted off, and about a few minutes into the blast off, one of the 5 engines prematurely shut down and there was a bit of fear that the mission would be scrubbed but Mission Control said the mission is still go.

At 12 minutes and 34 seconds, final main engine cutoff and that was

it. 

    Apollo is now in orbit and eventually takes its route from orbit to the moon. A required docking configuration to allow landing of the moon took place—called CSM (or Command and Service Module) docking—and after the dock was completed with success,  then the LEM (the lunar extraction module) did its extraction from the outer skin of the spent main rocket and the Apollo 13’s LEM, as well as the service module and the command module (all attached to the LEM) was destined for the moon. 

    The mission was for Apollo 13 to land on an area of the moon called the Fra Mauro highlands, an area not used by the Apollo 11’s LEM when it landed on the moon.

    Then, the order from Mission control involved stirring the two

oxygen tanks around the SM (or service module) of the spacecraft. The cryostir, as it is called, is started by Jim, starts and then, master alarms go off, then several loud bangs and shimmies, and Fred, Jimmy and Jim realize that something major is happening to the craft—in a very serious way, but not to their liking. Then even worse for the spaceship as the crew finds out more master alarms go off, and they respond to them. They shut off main switches and start others, and as they try to go around the ship to find something wrong from that famous quote Jim said, “Houston, we have a problem!”, Jim finally finds the culprit of the series of problems outside—-from the part of the SM where the explosion happened….venting of something, a gas…and Jim realizes that the spacecraft is leaking oxygen. Mission Control is astounded, and so are they. Now, Mission Control realizes that 2 fuel cells responsible for the oxygen needed to shut down, and the astronauts do shut down the cells, but sadly, Jim tells the other crew members the sad reality…“We lost the moon.” Then, they realize that the explosion caused a major loss of battery power in the other undamaged parts of the spacecraft, and fearing that they could die in the middle of space with no battery power left to go home, they decide to turn off any unnecessary power to the command module and move their operations to the LEM. But a wrench came into their attempted shutdown came when they temporary lost guidance and gimble control of the spacecraft, and realizing that the spacecraft could go way off course and not reach the moon at all, the astronauts did find a way to get back control of the spacecraft with help of Mission control, and finally, control of the ship was gradually going back to normal. 

   Turning off the command module would create an awful side

effect of losing any heat power from the batteries but it had to be

done, so the command module’s temperature eventually went down as

low as 10-15 degrees while they were quite warm in the LEM.

    But there was another problem as Mission Control decided that

the best way for them to return home was a FRT (Free-Return

Trajectory); Mission Control feared that if they re-fired the SM

engine that was damaged, another explosion would result and could

cause complete disintegration of the whole spacecraft and all three

astronauts would die, so the best careful option was to get them

around the moon without landing on it, and then make a re-fire using

not the SM engine, but the LEM engine. And it cannot be done until

they went around the moon, so Apollo 13 went around the moon and

headed towards Earth.

    So, as the astronauts felt the freezing draft from their powered-off CM, Mission Control’s data readout for the saving off power was underestimated and they learned that if they continued to keep the LEM at full power at that point (because the mission specialists now feared that unneeded amperage in the LEM had caused a rapid wasting of necessary battery power, which means power would die and re-entry would be impossible), the spacecraft would miss way off their re-entry mark and miss Earth entirely and the crew would die of hypothermia and starvation if they missed re-entry). So Mission Control placed a dranconian measure on the crew—the astronauts were told to turn off unneeded power to the LEM, and that included the heat too. 

So the astronauts were now faced with much more cold (at this point, temperatures went down as low as -5 to 0F--enough to create ice) and

even worse, Mission Control had found out that the CO2 scrubbers were compromised in the explosion, and caused an increase in concentration in CO2 levels in the spacecraft (the gauges for the C02 levels already were at 8-9, and were going to go past 15, which meant the astronauts would pass out from hypoxia from excess CO2 exposure and eventually black out and die); and not only that, what made it worse for this new problem with the CO2 levels was that incompatability of the scrubbers (the mechanisms that kept excess CO2 out of the craft)because the LEM scrubbers were round and the CO2 assemblies on the LEM were designed only for square scrubbers. 

So Mission Control made up an idea to use the different-shaped scrubbers just in time just before the astronauts passed out from asphyxiation from breathing in more and more CO2 that infiltrated more of their area. That idea worked and eventually the CO2 levels were back to normal—and not dangerous—-levels.

    Now the crew, very cold and very weary, had to do what is called a CCB—corridor control burn, a very special type of burn probably never been done on other Apollo missions, with the LEM engine. And when the LEM engine fired, Mission Control still warned them from using the computer to control the corridor because they still needed to save power in the LEM for re-entry, so they had to do all of that stuff manually using manual controls, so Fred was picked to control

the manual features of the craft that especially controlled the pitch and Jimmy controlled the time, and Jim did the rest – using the earth as a focal point. Then the LEM engine fired and it did fire, and then when shutdown happened, they got good news from Mission Control. The new data came out and said that they have enough power left to go to Earth.

   In the meantime, Ken Mattingly was forced up from his sleep by

NASA officials, explaining what happened to the Apollo spacecraft and was ordered into a simulation area that involved a replica of a

command module. Ken was to figure out the power-up sequence for the

command module that was powered off and the object is to get enough

amperage but not too much of it to cause a total permanent shutdown

of the craft. Several tries failed in his planned sequences, but then, just at the critical mark, he found a power-up sequence that would work. There was about at least a 30-minute delay for the crew to getKen’s power sequence to them so they remained really cold until then.

    Then, it was time. Ken’s successful sequence is rushed to the Mission Control room, and then, he gets the main comlink to the

astronauts. The main worry at the start of the power-up was conden-

sation on the panel controls—which could mean a short and the whole

sequence could fail if it happened, but each one of the power

apparatus was lit one at a time – and finally, the computer was on

and that was it—everything was back on. Now the worries are on the

pyrotechnic batteries for the parachutes—were they frozen up when thecommand module had to be turned off?

    Now, with the earth becoming bigger and bigger every time, it

was time to say goodbye to parts of the Apollo 13 spacecraft with

two jettisoning procedures. First, they had to separate the SM,

which they did, and they saw the major damage to part of the

spacecraft due to the oxygen tank explosion. Then, as they tried

to make sure that the pyro batteries were still good, they had to

move everything they needed into the command module just before they

had to say goodbye to the LEM with another jettison procedure that

separated the LEM from the command module. The separation was

successful but it was sad to see that ship that saved them from

complete doom go off into the vast regions of space as simply “space

junk”.

     Now, the biggest worry was the heat shield on the CM. Did it

get damaged in the explosion? (If the shield was damaged when it

re-enters earth, the whole craft would burn up and all three crew

members would die of incineration.) And what about the parachute

batteries? (If the parachute batteries do not work and the chutes do

not open on splashdown, the spacecraft would land in the water at 300 mph, and even with seat belts, the astronauts would still hit their heads so fast and die of traumatic concussion, instead of 20 miles per hour if the chutes were to work.)

   As they was about to go into the earth atmosphere, fortunately, the computer aligned the craft for re-entry, which would be somewhere near Iwo Jima in the Pacific, but sadly, there was a typhoon approaching near the splashdown zone. But Mission Control decided that it is still time for them to go home, so with radio silence completed for about 4-5 minutes as the CM goes into re-entry and the craft goes into a fiery wick, everybody who was involved in the mission were holding its breath – worried that the heat shield could not work. 

    The hope for the astronauts now was that the craft would survive re-entry so they can go out of the radio blackout zone and tell Mission Control that it was a successful re-entry.

    Then about 5 ½ minutes later, word from the crew to Mission

Control—the re-entry was successful – the heat-shield did its job

and the parachutes finally opened up several miles above the water.

Then the water embraced the craft as the CM splashed down into the

open water and just floated there. A battleship approached the CM

and rescued the 3 astronauts who were finally home after what would

have been a disastrous mission.