The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Liebergot looked away from his screen: the end, he knew, was at last here. Had the explosion or meteor collision or whatever else crippled the ship occurred seven hours earlier or one hour later, it would have been another EECOM on console at the time, another EECOM who would have attended this death watch. But the accident happened 55 hours, 54 minutes, and 53 seconds into the mission, during the last hour of a shift that by sheer scheduling happenstance belonged to Seymour Liebergot. Now Liebergot, through no fault of his own, was about to become the first flight controller in the history of the manned space program to lose the ship that had been placed in his charge, a calamity any controller worked his whole career to avoid. The EECOM turned to his right, toward where Bob Heselmeyer, the LEM’s environmental officer, sat. As Liebergot glanced again at Heselmeyer’s screen, he could not help thinking of that simulation, that terrible simulation which had nearly cost him his job a few weeks earlier.

“Remember,” said Liebergot, “when we were working on those lifeboat procedures?”

Heselmeyer gave him a blank look.

“The LEM lifeboat procedures we worked on in that sim?” Liebergot repeated.

Heselmeyer still stared blankly.

“I think,” said Liebergot, “it’s time we dusted them off.”

The EECOM steeled himself, signed back on the loop, and called to his flight director.

“Flight, EECOM.”

“Go ahead, EECOM.”

“The pressure in O₂ tank one is all the way down to 297,” Liebergot said. “We’d better think about getting into the LEM.”

“Roger, EECOM,” Kranz said. “TELMU and CONTROL, from Flight,” he called to the LEM’s environmental and guidance officers.

“Go, Flight.”

“I want you to get some guys figuring out minimum power needed in the LEM to sustain life.”

“Roger.”

“And I want LEM manning around the clock.”

“Roger that too.”

At the same time this conversation was taking place, Jack Swigert, on the center couch in Odyssey, looked at his instrument panel and discovered that while the oxygen readings might have been grim on the ground, they were downright dire in the spacecraft. Squinting through the growing darkness of his powered-down ship, where the temperature had fallen to a chilly 58 degrees, Swigert saw that his tank one pressure was down to a bare 205 pounds per square inch.

“Houston,” he said, signing back on the air, “it looks like tank one O₂ pressure is just a hair over 200. Does it look to you like it’s still going down?”

“It’s slowly going to zero,” Lousma responded. “We’re starting to think about the LEM lifeboat.”

Swigert, Lovell, and Haise exchanged nods. “Yes,” the command module pilot said, “that’s what we’re thinking about too.”

With an OK to abandon ship at last granted by the ground, the crew wasted little time in getting started. Assuming the men were entertaining any hopes of getting home, they could not just take up residence in the LEM and let their fading mother ship sputter to a halt like a car out of gas on a country road. Rather, since Odyssey would have to be used at the end of the flight for re-entry, the ship would have to be shut off one switch or system at a time so as to preserve the operation of all of its instruments and maintain the calibration of their settings. Under ideal conditions, all three men would handle the job; under current conditions, however, Swigert would have to take care of things on his own, because at the same time Odyssey was being taken off line, Aquarius would have to be brought on line, a two-man task that would have to be completed before the command module expired.

Lovell and Haise swam through the lower equipment bay and into the LEM, where they had broadcast their happy travelogue barely two hours earlier. Haise settled into his spot on the right side of the craft and surveyed the blacked out instrument panel. Lovell floated to his station on the left.

Swigert remained in Odyssey, still shutting down its systems, while Lovell and Haise were working in the LEM configuring the systems of the twin spacecraft. Odyssey’s controls had to be powered down before the LEM’s could be powered up. Swigert then joined Lovel and Haise in the LEM.

At Houston the shift changed. Glynn Lunney’s “Black” team took over from Kranz’s “White” team which began working on Apollo 13’s problems: how to bring them back before their resources ran out.