The command module, with its 417 knobs, levers, switches, selectors and buttons, was meant to be the astronauts’ home base during the mission. It’s a gas of some sort!” All too soon, it became clear that the gas was oxygen, which produced air and water for the astronauts and power for the engines. ![]() ![]() Less than a quarter-hour after the explosion, Lovell saw something frightening outside: “We are venting something out into the-into space. “Watching and listening to your crew die is something that will impress upon your mind forever.”Īfter an on-board explosion rendered their mission to the moon unattainable, the Apollo 13 crew (above from left: Jim Lovell (left), Ken Mattingly, and Fred Haise) knew their chances of returning safely to Earth were poor.Īt first, some thought that the spacecraft’s instruments might simply be malfunctioning an idea that would be disproven within minutes. In this case, they were especially motivated. “Every person that was in this room lived to flaunt the odds,” he told one interviewer. Kranz and his team were determined to bring the astronauts home. He looked for help to the men of Mission Control, whose average age was 27. “Nothing remotely like this had ever happened in a simulation,” flight director Gene Kranz wrote later. Immediately, alarm lights flared in the command module and at Mission Control. When the astronauts were about 200,000 miles from Earth, Mission Control asked Swigert to “stir” the cryogenic tanks-a routine task that generated a totally unexpected event: An exposed wire in the second oxygen tank ignited a fire that led to the blast that would rewrite Apollo 13’s mission. However, two days and seven hours later, Apollo 13 suffered a true catastrophe. People at Mission Control hoped this would be the mission’s biggest glitch. To get the ship into orbit, that stage’s other engines had to burn 34 seconds, while Stage 3 had to fire for nine extra seconds longer. Then, during the liftoff, the center engine of Stage 2 cut off two minutes early. His backup, Swigert, joined the team with little time to work alongside his new crewmates before the mission began. Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly was exposed to German measles and grounded. Navy divers pose with the Command Module (now held in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum) after it is recovered at sea in April of 1970.Īpollo 13 suffered its first unexpected issue two days before liftoff. ![]() It was just problem after problem after problem.” “It’s hard to believe that they were able to come back from the moon and to continually solve all the different problems that arose. “It’s one of those stories where they were able to overcome all sorts of odds, and it’s an extraordinary adventure story,” says Smithsonian curator Teasel Muir-Harmony, from the National Air and Space Museum and home of Apollo 13’s command module, now on loan to the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas. For days, they lived in refrigerator-like temperatures with only six ounces of water available for each man per day, and yet, these daring men in their crippled space capsule never gave up. Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise knew that their chances of returning safely to Earth were poor. The heartbeats of earthbound humans quickened listening to broadcasts of the three men as they spoke to Mission Control in their unwavering, matter-of-fact fighter pilot voices. For most of second week of April in 1970, the whole world watched as the exhausted, underfed and dehydrated Apollo 13 astronauts fought for their lives after an on-board explosion rendered their mission to the Moon unattainable.
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