“We had to cut our energy consumption in half in order to make it back home,” engineer Henry Pohl recalled. Working backward from that goal, to every minute of the return path, they ruthlessly budgeted the mission’s electricity. They would need enough juice to safely guide the crew capsule into Earth’s atmosphere. They knew how much they would need, with luck, in the mission’s last minutes. With the spacecraft’s fuel cells mostly useless now – just like astronauts, they required oxygen to run – the engineers had to conserve every bit of electrical power. ![]() Scores of engineers started their calculations. Nobody said a word to the guy on the left or the guy on the right. “There might have been two hundred of us turning our cars off and walking in at the same pace. … We’d all gotten called in-all three shifts.” They efficiently filled the parking lot outside Mission Control. “All of a sudden, it was about midnight, it was just a line of cars with their lights on. Aldo Bordano, in his early twenties, remembers the commute. “You really need to understand that the is dying.”Īs word spread through the ranks, everyone who could possibly help swarmed to the center. “You guys are wasting your time,” he said. Thinking back on it, he saw his distance from the Control Center as good fortune – he could see the entire forest of information. “That’s not an instrumentation problem,” he told them. Aaron asked to hear the numbers from various instruments, one at a time, over the phone. Aldridge told him they were facing an instrument problem or “flaky readouts”-there was no way data this extreme could be real – they couldn’t lose the mission’s stored oxygen so quickly. He made a phone call to an especially insightful young engineer, John Aaron.Īaron recalled being at home, winding down after a long shift at Mission Control. “First of all, we thought we’d boil it down to something simple and obvious,” engineer Arnold Aldridge recalled later. It looked like they were rapidly losing their oxygen supply. Engineers tried to sift through reams of odd data coming about the Apollo 13 spacecraft, from instrument readings to the confused reports from three astronauts. ![]() The photo has been removed.Late on 13 April 1970, the night shift had started in Houston’s Manned Spaceflight Center. Below, a few images from those eventful days 50 years ago.Īn earlier version of this photo essay inadvertently included a photo from a previous Apollo mission. Events that could have resulted in tragedy became stories of ingenuity, perseverance, and survival. ![]() Rapid calculations and actions by the astronauts and Mission Control in Houston were able to salvage life-support systems, alter course to return to Earth (skipping the lunar landing), and get the crew safely home. As the crew were approaching the moon, an explosion took place on the service module, blasting open a panel, damaging equipment, and venting oxygen into space. ![]() Apollo 13 was planned to be NASA’s third manned mission to land on the lunar surface, and, despite a few minor issues, went according to plan-until disaster struck about 56 hours into the journey. This Saturday will mark a half century since the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission to the moon launched from the Florida coast on April 11, 1970.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |