Apollo: The Race to the Moon (69 page)

Odyssey was visibly wet from condensed moisture when they powered it up. Pushing aside thoughts of how water-soaked wires might react, Swigert began to turn on equipment in the command module. After feeling like a passenger for the last three days, the command module pilot was glad to have a job to do again. He also watched himself critically, aware of the ways in which exhaustion could betray him. When it came to arming the pyrotechnics, he was taking no chances at all. Once they were armed, a flick of a single switch would separate Odyssey from the service module; the flick of another switch right beside it would separate Odyssey from Aquarius. Because the LEM had to do all the preliminary maneuvering for the entry, the service module would go first. The day before, Swigert had put a piece of tape over the LEM’s switch. A piece of paper dangled from it, with “NO” written in large red letters.

Separation of the service module came at 138 hours into the mission, four and a half hours before splashdown. From his station in Odyssey, Swigert couldn’t see the service module as it drifted away. He could, however, hear excited voices from Aquarius. “There’s one whole side of the spacecraft missing,” Lovell reported to the ground. Wires were dangling, the area around the oxygen tanks was a tangle of ripped metal—“It’s really a mess,” Haise said.

Until then, no one had realized the magnitude of the explosion. Chuck Deiterich listened over the loops and felt a chill. The oxygen tanks were close to the base of the heat shield. The obvious possibility was that the heat shield had been damaged, perhaps even cracked. “I think everybody in the room had the same idea at the same time,” Deiterich recalled. “Everybody knew where the oxygen tank was. Nobody said a word about it. There was nothing anybody could do.” In any case, John Aaron kept them from brooding—somewhere, something in the C.S.M. was using two amps more than his budget called for, and Aaron was implacable, Kranz recalled, “driving the controllers nuts” as he went from console to console until he found the culprit: a backup control system that had inadvertently been switched on.

The good news was that the command module’s guidance system had survived the refrigeration. However, Control and Guido were finding its alignment to be a struggle. The crew had transferred a rough alignment from Aquarius to Odyssey, but it had been a haphazard proposition—Lovell in the LEM, shouting the angles to Swigert in the command module, hoping the spacecraft didn’t shift position between the time he shouted and the time Swigert punched the number into the computer. Getting star sightings from the command module to check the alignment had once again proved difficult, and only after a long struggle was it determined that the rough-and-ready alignment was good.

Then it was time to position Odyssey for jettisoning the LEM. Looking out the window, Lovell was supposed to use Aquarius’s thrusters to pitch and roll and yaw the docked spacecraft so that he could see a particular star, then shift the spacecraft so that he could see another, then another, until at the end of the sequence he would be in the right position for the jettison. In the process, Lovell brought the command module’s guidance system, so recently aligned, perilously near gimbal lock. Once more instructions had to be shouted across the two spacecraft, this time from Swigert to Lovell, to do this, that, and the other thing to keep Odyssey’s guidance system safe.

At 10:43 Friday morning, the crew of Apollo 13, together in Odyssey for the first time since they had evacuated it three days earlier, jettisoned Aquarius. “Farewell, Aquarius,” Lovell said quietly, “and we thank you.” In the MOCR, TELMU wished irrationally that there were some way to preserve Aquarius’s life, to bring her back home after all she’d done. In the Grumman plant at Bethpage, a LEM engineer, filled with pride for his machine, remembered a time in his youth when he had pulled a struggling swimmer from the water. That had made him feel good—but nothing like this.

Retro’s worst moment that morning came after Aquarius had been jettisoned, when Odyssey was approaching the earth alone. One may visualize what was happening by imagining a line drawn between Odyssey and the earth’s horizon. Odyssey had to be aimed at a point no less than 5.5 degrees and no more than 7.3 degrees below that line. As Odyssey approached earth, Deiterich had been forecasting that the actual angle of attack would be 6.51 degrees, safely in the middle of the corridor. Now, minutes before Odyssey reached the atmosphere, Dave Reed handed Deiterich updated figures showing that the angle would be 6.2 degrees. “I don’t believe you, FIDO!” he said in frustration, knowing that he had to. Once again, as mysteriously as ever, the spacecraft’s trajectory was shallowing.

Without much data, Deiterich now had to make a crucial decision. He was due to pass up to the crew the final PAD (Pre-Advisory Data), containing the lift vector that would govern the spacecraft’s amount of lift while it fought the atmosphere. If between this moment and the time the spacecraft hit the atmosphere the entry trajectory shallowed by as much as an additional one-tenth of a degree, Deiterich must change the lift vector from the one he had planned. The trajectory had already shallowed by three-tenths of a degree that morning. Would it continue at the same rate? If he made the wrong choice he would certainly affect the landing site substantially. He conceivably could cause the spacecraft to miss the entry corridor altogether. The crew and Kranz periodically inquired when the PAD was going to be ready, and Deiterich kept putting them off until the last minute. His last possible trajectory update from Reed indicated that the rate of shallowing had decreased. Deiterich held his breath and decided to stick with the original PAD figures.*

[* The cause of the shallowing throughout the return from the moon was eventually determined to be water boiling off the LEM’s cooling system. (This effect had not had time to reveal itself during the comparatively short hops that the LEM had taken during previous missions.) Once the LEM was jettisoned, the cause of the shallowing ended, which is why the last updates showed a slowing rate and encouraged Deiterich to guess correctly that the additional change would not exceed a tenth of a degree.]

The traffic on the loops in the last minutes before the spacecraft began its entry was indistinguishable from that of a nominal entry after a nominal mission. Long stretches of silence were broken by routine updates on the trajectory and the disposition of the recovery forces.

The last exchange between the crew and the ground began on an unsettling note. “I know all of us here want to thank all you guys down there for the very fine job you did,” Swigert said, as if he thought this might be his last chance to say it. Then the atmosphere lightened. “I sure wish I could go to the FIDO party tonight,” added Swigert, a bachelor with a Center-wide reputation as a ladies’ man. CapCom Joe Kerwin advised Swigert that the controllers would be glad to call any phone numbers that Swigert might want to pass down.

When a spacecraft enters the earth’s atmosphere, ionization of the air around it prevents radio communication for a period of minutes. On the Apollo flights, it was usually something over three minutes, by which time the spacecraft would be at about 100,000 feet, still slowing until its parachutes could be deployed. On Thirteen, four minutes came and went with no communication from the spacecraft.

The MOCR was silent. If the heat shield had been cracked, it made no difference that EECOM had gotten them to the entry with plenty of electricity, no difference that the Trench had gotten Odyssey into the correct attitude for entry.

Kranz asked the network controller whether he had gotten a signal from ARIA, the spacecraft’s automatic radio beacon.

“Not at this time, Flight.”

For another interminable forty-six seconds there was nothing on the loops but the hiss of the open circuit.

“Network, no ARIA contact yet?” Kranz asked tightly.

“Not at this time, Flight.”

The signal was now almost two minutes late.

After thirteen more seconds, word came from the network controller, in the best MOCR cryptic:

“ARIA 4 is A.O.S., Flight.” One of the ground stations had acquired an automatic signal. It didn’t necessarily mean that the crew was alive, but it did mean that Odyssey was not a cinder. Kranz’s “Rog” was husky.

Still no word from the crew. After a few more seconds, Kranz asked CapCom to call them—“Just advise ’em, standing by,” he said.

“Odyssey, Houston. Standing by, over,” said Kerwin. Four more seconds passed.

“Okay, Joe,” Jack Swigert said.

Still there was silence in the MOCR. As Rocco Petrone, sitting in the back row, would explain it later, getting voice contact was encouraging but not good enough. Who knew what had happened to the electronics of the chutes? Petrone prayed.

You can still hear the voices of the Apollo controllers, recorded for posterity on the tapes kept at Houston and in the National Archives. You can hear the voices from the back rooms and the fainter voices of the astronauts themselves. What you cannot hear are the background noises of flight control—the microphones on the controllers’ headsets were too highly directional to pick up extraneous sounds. Thus, at the point after the first lunar landing on Apollo 11 when Kranz had to call for quiet in the MOCR, the listener must imagine the hubbub for himself. On the first night of Apollo 13’s troubles, when Lunney had to call for quiet, the tapes reveal nothing of the commotion that was distracting him.

But three minutes and fifty-three seconds after Jack Swigert’s “Okay, Joe,” the screen at the right front of the MOCR lit up with a television image of Odyssey, its main parachutes safely deployed. That moment, you can still hear. No microphone could have filtered out that pandemonium.

As Odyssey swung beneath its triple parachute, Lovell recalled his landing on Apollo 8, when the spacecraft had smacked into the water flat and very hard. “Gentlemen, be prepared for this landing,” he informed his crew. “It’s going to be rough.” But he was wrong. Odyssey caught a wave at just the right angle, and Thirteen ended with barely a bump.

Chapter 30. “We drank the wine at the pace they handed it to us”

Apollo came to mean many things to the people who were part of it, but it began as Jack Kennedy’s Apollo. Kennedy’s Apollo was not a spacecraft, not an engineering project, not a means of adding to man’s scientific knowledge. Kennedy’s Apollo was a heap of chips pushed to the center of the table.

Kennedy’s Apollo came out of a long and honored tradition of great American boasts—that we could whip the British, cross the Rockies, build taller buildings, grow more corn and make better mousetraps than anyone else. Childish boasts, some would say, for there was never anything subtle about them: “Anything anyone else can do, America can do better.” But there was always an added clause that gave them weight and dignity: “If you don’t believe it, just watch us.” Kennedy’s commitment was the quintessence of this tradition, right down to the gratuitous deadline, “before this decade is out.”

Kennedy’s Apollo came to an end with the landing of Apollo 13. It hadn’t been planned that way, but, as it turned out, Thirteen was the pinnacle of the spirit behind Kennedy’s commitment. It was a spectacularly American response to crisis—unorganized (in a way), with people in a hundred different places across the country racing to do their parts; youngsters taking charge; improvisation in minutes and invention in hours; courage; indomitability; and then, afterward, a good deal of shrugging it off—“Hey, it was no big deal, we knew after the first half hour we could do it.”

Apollo 13 was also the last moment when the nation was transfixed by the adventure. When the initial commitment was made in 1961, it seemed that landing a man on the moon would be just a beginning, a foray by scouts to be followed by outposts and then by settlers. It was this kind of thinking in the early 1960s that enabled Stanley Kubrick to begin a movie about a voyage to Jupiter via a huge space station and lunar colony and plausibly entitle it 2001.

By the time the movie was released in 1968, the title was already implausible, for the space program’s grip on the public imagination had begun to fade even before the first moon landing. Whether this was inevitable or an unlucky juxtaposition of Apollo with Vietnam and domestic upheaval will never be known. But what had been imagined as a natural process of growth in manned space travel had by 1970 come to be seen as a technological exercise that wasn’t worth the effort.

In the political arena, the opposition to manned space flight was not just a matter of indifference, but of growing hostility. Editorials recited how many hospital beds could be provided or teachers’ salaries paid with the cost of a moon shot. NASA reacted with paeans to the many practical spin-offs from Apollo technology—paeans which were accurate, but defensive. Few at that time or subsequently were willing to say passionately that the expansion of mankind into the solar system was an end in itself that justified the cost, whether or not it led to better computers, pacemakers, or flame-resistant pajamas back here on earth.

Unimpressed by the claims of spin-offs, NASA’s critics conceded only that Apollo had shown what the nation could accomplish if it really tried. A new all-purpose political platitude entered the language: “If this nation can put a man on the moon, then it should be able to …” Cure cancer. Stop crime. End poverty. All it would take, many seemed to think at the time, was the same kind of money and commitment that the United States had lavished on Apollo.

NASA itself had already begun to change by the time Thirteen flew, a point that many of its veterans have made. The truly fun parts of the manned space program, so many said, were Mercury and Gemini and the planning years of Apollo, when the centers were still independent and feisty, collaborating when it suited them, sometimes going their own inefficiently separate ways—but also electric with enthusiasm and imagination, prodigiously inventive. Then, for the last half of the 1960s, NASA seemed to be getting the best of both worlds—superb management without bureaucratic paralysis. By 1970, it was apparent that the bureaucracy was going to become more and more dominant, and it was acting more and more like bureaucracies elsewhere. Maybe organizations, like people, can’t stay young forever, the veterans conceded. But it sure was fun while it lasted.