The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Windler relayed this to Lousma: “Capcom, tell him to turn on the lights.”

“Aquarius, Houston,” Lousma called.

“Go ahead, Houston,” Lovell answered.

“OK, skipper. We figured out a way for you to keep warm. We decided to start powering up the LEM now. Just the LEM, though, not the command module. So open your LEM prep checklist and turn to the thirty-minute activation. You copy?”

“Uh, copy,” said Lovell. “And you’re sure we have plenty of electrical power to do this?”

Slayton cut in. “Jim, you’ve got 100 percent margins on everything from here on in.”

“That sounds encouraging.”

The commander turned to his crewmates, gestured to the instrument panel, and with the help of Haise, went into a frenzy of switch-throwing, completing the half-hour power-up in just twenty-one minutes. As soon as Aquarius’s systems came online, the crew could feel the temperature in the frigid cockpit begin to climb. And no sooner did the temperature start to climb than Lovell took a step to make sure it climbed even further. Grabbing his attitude controller, now active again, he spun his ship in a half somersault, so that the sun, which had been falling uselessly on the rump of the service module fell across the face of the LEM.

Almost at once, a yellow-white slash of light flowed into the ship. Lovell turned his face up to it, closed his eyes, and smiled.

“Houston, the sun feels wonderful,” he said “It’s shining straight in the windows, and it’s getting a lot warmer in here already. Thank you very much.”

After the mission they came to some conclusions about the causes of the explosion and the erosion of the descent angle:

But it was only when their engineering hunches were put to the test that they were confirmed. In vacuum chambers at the Space Center in Houston, technicians switched on a heater in a sample tank precisely as Apollo 13’s heater had been switched on and found that the thermostat did in fact fuse shut; they then left the heater on just as Apollo 13’s heater had been left on and found that the Teflon on its wires indeed burned away; finally, they stirred up its cryogenics exactly as Apollo 13’s cryos had been stirred and found that a spark indeed flew from a wire, causing the sample tank to rupture at the neck and blow off the side panel of a sample service module with it.

The only other mystery that had yet to be solved was what had caused the shallowing of the trajectory on the way home, and it was left to the TELMUs to dope this one out. Aquarius, so these flight controllers concluded, had been pushing itself steadily off course, not with some undetected leak from a damaged tank or pipe, but from wisps of steam wafting from its cooling system. The tendrils of vapor that the water-based sublimator emitted as it carried excess heat off into space had never disturbed a LEM’s trajectory, but only because the lander was typically not powered up until it was already in lunar orbit, ready to separate from the mother ship and descend to the surface. For such a short haul trip, the invisible plume of steam would not be strong enough to nudge the lander in any one direction. Over the course of a slow 240,000-mile glide back to Earth, however, the almost unmeasurable thrust would be more than enough to alter the spacecraft’s flight path, pushing it out of its reentry corridor altogether.

On Friday, 17 July at 10.43 am it was time for separation from the damaged service module.

“Aquarius, Houston,” Joe Kerwin called from the Capcom station.

“Go, Joe,” Fred Haise answered.

“I have attitudes and angles for service module separation if you want to copy. You don’t need a pad for it, just any old blank sheet of paper will do.”

In the spacecraft, Lovell, Haise and Swigert were in their accustomed positions, all awake and all feeling reasonably alert. Lovell had decided against the Dexedrine tablets Slayton had prescribed for his crew last night, knowing that the lift from the stimulants would be only fleeting, and the subsequent letdown would leave them feeling even worse than they did now. For the time being, the commander had decided that the astronauts would get by on adrenaline alone. Haise, his cheeks still flushed by fever, needed the adrenaline rush more than his crewmates, and at the moment he appeared to be getting it.

“Go ahead Houston,” he said, tearing a piece of paper from a flight plan and producing his pen.

“OK, the procedure reads as follows: First, maneuver the LEM to the following attitude: roll, 000 degrees: pitch, 91.3 degrees; yaw, 000 degrees.” Haise scribbled quickly and did not immediately respond. “Do you want those attitudes repeated, Fred?”

“Negative, Joe.”