“Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
It turned out the oxygen tank was at fault; months later,
NASA traced a series of mishaps on the ground that
accidentally made it unsuitable for spacelight.
But in the minutes after the explosion, helping the crew
was the irst priority. Once power from the spacecraft’s fuel
cells began to fail, and oxygen levels in the service module
tanks fell toward zero, it quickly became clear that Apollo 13
could not land on the Moon. Lovell looked outside a window
and saw oxygen venting into space. he crew of Apollo 13
quickly reopened the tunnel to Aquarius, which became their
lifeboat. hey rapidly powered up Aquarius to stay alive and
powered down Odyssey to conserve its resources for the trip
back through Earth’s atmosphere.
Astronomers around the world were able to see the cloud
created by the Apollo 13 explosion, including Frank
Younger and Ernie Pfannenschmidt, who obtained photos
with a 0.4 m (16-inch) telescope on top of Mount Kobau
in British Columbia.
Long shot home
Apollo 13 was close to the Moon when it exploded; at
more than 320,000 kilometres away from Earth, it had to
loop around the Moon before coming home. hat meant
that Aquarius had to support three astronauts for nearly
four days, even though it was designed to support only
two astronauts for a day and a half.
Under the leadership of light director Gene Kranz, light
controllers in Houston and experts at contractor plants
around the United States went to work on plans to get the
astronauts home.
Much of what the crew did to save themselves had never
been tried before. Odyssey was powered down — a irst in
space — and mission controllers drew up a procedure to
return the spacecraft to life just before it re-entered the
Earth’s atmosphere. Only Odyssey could make it home, as
Aquarius had no protective heat shield to bring the astro-
nauts through the atmosphere.
While there was enough breathing oxygen in Aquarius,
there was a problem scrubbing the carbon dioxide exhaled
by the astronauts. A team at mission control concocted a
device, using light plan covers and duct tape, to allow
Odyssey’s scrubber cartridges to it into Aquarius’s system,
which used diferent cartridges.
Mattingly — who ironically, never got the German measles —
joined other mission controllers with helping the crew come
home safely. →
April 1970. An interior view of the Apollo 13 lunar module (LM).
This photograph shows some of the temporary apparatus and
hose connections that were needed when the three Apollo
astronauts moved from the command module to use the LM as
a “lifeboat.” Astronaut John Swigert, command module pilot, is
on the right. (NASA)April 1970. Interior view of the Apollo 13 Lunar Module (LM)
showing the “mail box,” a jury-rigged arrangement which the
Apollo 13 astronauts built to use the Command Module lithium
hydroxide canisters to purge carbon dioxide from the LM.
The “mail box” was designed and tested on the ground at the
Manned Spacecraft Center before it was suggested to the
problem-plagued Apollo 13 crew. (NASA)SKYNEWS • MAR/APR 2020