The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

He eased his way gently forward, discovering – as centuries of remorseful drinkers with late-night bed spins had learned – that if he kept his eyes focused on one spot and moved very, very slowly, he could keep his churning innards under control. Easing his way about in this tentative way, Lovell began to negotiate the space directly around his seat, failing to notice that a small metal toggle protruding from the front of his spacesuit had snagged one of the metal struts of the couch. As he moved forward the toggle caught, and a loud pop and hiss echoed through the spacecraft. The astronaut looked down and noticed that his bright yellow life vest, worn as a precaution during liftoffs over water, was ballooning up to full size across his chest.

“Aw, hell,” Lovell muttered, dropping his head into his hand and pushing himself back into his seat.

“What happened?” a startled Anders asked, looking over from the right-hand couch.

“What does it look like,” Lovell said, more annoyed with himself than his junior pilot. “I think I snagged my vest on something.”

“Well, unsnag it,” Borman said. “We’ve got to get that thing deflated and stowed.”

“I know,” Lovell said, “but how?”

Borman realized Lovell had a point. The emergency life vests were inflated from little canisters of pressurized carbon dioxide that emptied their contents into the bladder of the vest. Since the canisters could not be refilled, deflating the vest required opening its exhaust valve and dumping CO₂ into the surrounding air. Out in the ocean this was not a problem, of course, but in a cramped Apollo command module it could be a bit dicey. The cockpit was equipped with cartridges of granular lithium hydroxide that filtered CO₂ out of the air, but the cartridges had a saturation point after which they could absorb no more. While there were replacement cartridges on board, it was hardly a good idea to challenge the first cartridge on the first day with a hot belch of carbon dioxide let loose in the small cabin. Borman and Anders looked at Lovell, and the three men shrugged helplessly.

“Apollo 8, Houston. Do you read?” the Capcom called, evidently concerned that he hadn’t heard from the crew for a long minute.

“Roger,” Borman answered. “We had a little incident here. Jim inadvertently popped one life vest, so we’ve got one full Mae West with us.”

“Roger,” the Capcom replied, seemingly without an answer to offer. “Understand.”

With their 180 minutes of Earth orbit ticking away and no time to waste on the trivial matter of a life vest, Lovell and Borman suddenly hit on an answer: the urine dump. In a storage area near the foot of the couches was a long hose connected to a tiny valve leading to the outside of the spacecraft. At the loose end of the hose was a cylindrical assembly. The entire apparatus was known in flying circles as a relief tube. An astronaut in need of the relief the system provided could position the cylinder just so, open the valve to the vacuum outside, and from the comfort of a multi-million-dollar spacecraft speeding along at up to 25,000 miles per hour, urinate into the celestial void.

Lovell had availed himself of the relief tube countless times before, but only for its intended purpose. Now he would have to improvise. Strugging out of his life vest, he wrestled it down to the urine port, and with some finessing managed to wedge its nozzle into the tube. It was a forced fit but a workable one. Lovell gave the high sign to Borman, Borman nodded back, and while the commander and the LEM pilot went through their pre-lunar checklist, Lovell coaxed his life vest back to its deflated state, patiently correcting the first blunder he had committed in nearly 430 hours in space.

Lovell explained Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI):

The maneuver, known as lunar orbit insertion, or LOI, was a straight-forward one, but it was fraught with risks. If the engine burned for too short a time, the ship would go into an unpredictable – perhaps uncontrollable – elliptical orbit that would take it high up above the moon when it was over one hemisphere and plunge it down again when it was over the other. If the engine burned too long, the ship would slow too much and drop not just down into lunar orbit but down onto the moon’s surface. Complicating matters, the engine burn would have to take place when the spacecraft was behind the moon, making communication between the ship and the ground impossible. Houston would have to come up with the best burn coordinates it could, feed the data up to the crew, and trust them to carry out the maneuver on their own. The ground controllers knew exactly when the spacecraft should appear from behind the massive lunar shadow if the burn went according to plan, and only if they reacquired Apollo 8’s signal at that time would they know that the LOI had worked as planned.