The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

“Right by the – look out there, would you? Right by the high-gain antenna. The whole panel is blown out, almost from the base to the engine.”

“Copy that,” said Kerwin.

“It looks like it got the engine bell too,” Haise said, shaking Lovell’s arm and pointing to the big funnel protruding from the back of the module. Lovell saw a long, brown burn mark on the conical exhaust port.

“Think it zinged the bell, huh?” Kerwin asked.

“That’s the way it looks. It’s really a mess.”

The next task was to power up Odyssey.

In the cockpit of Aquarius, Lovell looked at Swigert and motioned him to the tunnel. Unlike the reading of the power-up checklist fourteen hours earlier, the execution of the list would be a simple matter, requiring less than half an hour’s work by the command module pilot.

As the first switch was thrown, sending a surge of power through the long, cold wires, Lovell braced for the sickening pop and sizzle indicating that the condensation soaking the instrument panel had indeed found an unprotected switch or junction and shorted the ship right back out. It was a sound he had first heard over the Sea of Japan and one he clearly hoped he would never hear again. But as the power-up cockpit proceeded, Swigert threw his first breaker and his second, and his third, and soon, all the crewmen heard was the reassuring hum and gurgle indicating the spacecraft was coming back to life.

EECOM John Aaron knew that the rute of energy consumption was critical. Lovell:

The way Aaron had ciphered things out, the ship could afford to pull no more than 43 amps of juice if it hoped to stay alive for the full two hours of reentry. But, having won the argument in room 210 over when to turn the telemetry on, he wouldn’t know if he was actually staying within this power budget until the command module was completely powered up and the data started streaming back from the ship. If it turned out that Odyssey was consuming juice above the 43 amp level, even for a short while, there was a real chance its batteries would be exhausted before it ever hit the ocean.

When the readings came back, they showed Odyssey’s power consumption was 2 amps higher than the level which would last. They identified the instruments which were consuming the extra power as being back-up systems which could be shut down. This brought power consumption back to the 43 amp level which would last until splash down. The LEM was now expendable but Haise was in a very bad shape.

“Man,” Lovell muttered, “you are a mess.” Moving behind Haise, the commander wrapped him in a bear hug to share his body heat. At first the gesture seemed to accomplish nothing, but gradually the trembling subsided.

“Fred, why don’t you get upstairs and help Jack out,” Lovell said. “I’ll finish up here.”

Haise nodded and prepared to jump up the tunnel. But before he did, he stopped and took a long look around Aquarius’s cockpit. Impulsively, he pushed back toward his station. Attached to the wall was a large screen of fabric netting used to prevent small items from floating behind the instrument panel. Haise grabbed hold of the netting and gave a sharp pull; it tore free with a ripping sound.

“Souvenir,” he said with a shrug, wadding the netting into a ball, stuffing it into his pocket, and vanishing up the tunnel.

Alone in the lunar module, Lovell too glanced slowly around it. The debris of four days of close-quarters living was collected in the cluttered cockpit, and Aquarius now looked less the intrepid moonship it had been on Monday than a sort of galactic garbage scow. Lovell waded through the scraps of paper and rubbish and moved back toward his window. Before jumping ship himself, he had one more job: steering the twin vehicles to the attitude Jerry Bostick had specified, so the LEM would drop into the deep water off New Zealand.

Lovell took the attitude control for the last time and pushed it to the side. The ship yawed slightly, jostling some of the floating paper. Without the inert mass of the service module skewing the center of gravity so badly, Aquarius was far more maneuverable, much closer to the nimble ship the simulators in Houston and Florida had conditioned Lovell to expect before this mission began. With a few practiced adjustments, he moved the lander to the proper position, then called the ground.

“OK Houston, Aquarius. I’m at the LEM separation attitude.”

“I can’t think of a better idea, Jim,” Kerwin replied.