The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Bad as these developments were, Lovell had yet another problem to contend with. More than ten minutes after the initial bang, his spacecraft was still swaying and wobbling. Each time the command service module and the attached LEM moved, the thrusters would fire automatically to counteract the motion and try to stabilize the ships. But each time they appeared to have succeeded, the ships would start lurching again and the thrusters would resume their firing.

Lovell now took hold of the manual attitude controller built into the console, to the right of his seat. If the automatic systems couldn’t bring the ships to heel, perhaps a pilot could. Lovell was concerned about keeping the spacecraft under control for more than aesthetic reasons. Apollo ships on the way to the moon did not simply fly straight and true, with the command module’s nose pointed properly forward and the LEM attached to it like a big, ungainly hood ornament. Rather, the ships rotated slowly like a 1 rpm top. This was known as the passive thermal control, or PTC, position and was intended to keep the ships evenly barbecued, preventing one side from cooking in the glare of the unfiltered sun and the other side from freezing over in the deep freeze of shadowed space. The thruster convulsions of Apollo 13 had shot the graceful PTC choreography all to hell, and unless Lovell could regain control he faced the real danger of ultra-high and ultra-low temperatures seeping through the ship’s skin and damaging sensitive equipment. But no matter how Lovell worked his manual thrusters, he could not seem to settle his spacecraft down. No sooner had he stabilized Odyssey than it would go off line again.

For a pilot who had been taken to space three times before, with little more than nuisance problems from his equipment, this was getting to be intolerable. The electrical system in Lovell’s smoothly functioning craft had gone on the fritz, the safe harbor of home was shrinking in his mirror at better than 2,000 miles every hour, and now he faced even greater danger because something – who knew what – kept shoving his ship this way and that.

The commander let go of the attitude controller, punched open his seat restraint buckle, and floated up to the left-hand window to see if he could determine what was going on out there. It was the oldest pilot’s instinct in the world. Even when he was nearly 200,000 miles from home, in a sealed spacecraft surrounded by the killing vacuum of space, what Lovell really needed was a simple walk-around, a chance to make one slow 360 degree circuit of his ship, to eyeball the exterior, kick the tires, look for damage, sniff for leaks, and then tell the folks on the ground if anything was really wrong and just what had to be done to fix it.

However, he had to settle for a look out the side window, in the hope that whatever problem Odyssey might have would somehow make itself clear. The odds of diagnosing the ship’s illness this way were long, but as it turned out, they paid off instantly. As soon as Lovell pressed his nose to the glass, his eye caught a thin, white, gassy cloud surrounding his craft, crystallizing on contact with space, and forming an irridescent halo that extended tenuously for miles in all directions. Lovell drew a breath and began to suspect he might be in deep, deep trouble.

If there’s one thing a spacecraft commander doesn’t want to see when he looks out his window, it’s something venting from his ship. In the same way that airline pilots fear smoke on a wing, space pilots fear venting. Venting can never be dismissed as instrumentation, venting can never be brushed off as ratty data. Venting means that something has breached the integrity of your craft and is slowly, perhaps fatally, bleeding its essence out into space.

Lovell gazed at the growing gas cloud. If the fuel cells hadn’t killed his lunar touchdown, this certainly did. In a way, he felt strangely philosophical – risks of the trade, rules of the game, and all that. He knew that his landing on the moon was never a sure thing until the footpads of the LEM had settled into the lunar dust, and now it looked as if they never would. At some point, Lovell understood, he’d mourn this fact, but that time was not now. Now he had to tell Houston – where they were still checking their instrumentation and analyzing their readouts – that the answer did not lie in the data but in a glowing cloud surrounding the ailing ship.

“It looks to me,” Lovell told the ground uninflectedly, “that we are venting something.” Then, for impact, and perhaps to persuade himself, he repeated: “We are venting something into space.”

“Roger,” Lousma responded in the mandatory matter of factness of the Capcom, “we copy your venting,”

“It’s a gas of some sort,” Lovell said.

“Can you tell us anything about it? Where is it coming from?”

“It’s coming out of window one right now, Jack,” Lovell answered, offering only as much detail as his limited vantage point provided.