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History This Week, April 14th, 1970.
I'm Sally Helm. Ok Houston, we've had a problem here.
A quarter of a million miles away from Earth, there's been an explosion.
Three astronauts are floating around in the cabin of their spacecraft trying desperately to figure out what just happened?
Why are we losing oxygen so fast?
Can we fix this? The ship is Apollo 13, and its crew ends up pulling off the narrowest escape in the history of space travel.
There's even a famous movie about it.
Everything went wrong, and they still made it back alive.
So how exactly did Captain Jim Lovell and his crew fly a broken, half -functioning craft back to Earth?
We found the perfect person to ask.
Well, my name, of course, is Captain Jim Lovell, I was on Apollo 13.
Today, we asked Jim Lovell to relive the 143 hours he spent dealing with the crisis and how he and his crew stayed alive when everything around them seemed to be falling apart.
What is the science of saving a spaceship?
I lost you for a sec, are you there?
Hello? Hi, I'm there.
Can you hear me? Go ahead.
Great. We reached Capt.
Lovell at his home in Illinois.
The connection wasn't perfect, apologies for the sometimes not great audio.
Jim Lovell is one of the most famous astronauts of all time.
Commander, Jim Lovell reporting shutdown.
The engine is off. We're at 79 hours, 32 minutes into the flight." He was made even more famous when Tom Hanks played him in the movie Apollo 13.
He set his sights on outer space when he was just a kid, which, in the 1940s, was pretty novel.
When he was graduating from high school, he wrote a letter to the American Rocket Society asking, what's the best way for me to get a job building rockets?
They suggested going to MIT or Caltech. Well, I couldn't afford to go to college.
So instead, he joined the Navy and became a pilot.
And a few years later, this new governmental agency, NASA, comes knocking.
They're looking for military pilots who might make good astronauts.
And Jim Lovell gets called in to try out — he has to take a physical.
I was one of the 32 people accepted to go to the physical.
I was the only guy to flunk.
And, uh, I think the doctors couldn't feel comfortable passing everybody, so they had to flunk somebody.
He had high bilirubin levels in his blood, which is generally harmless on its own, but it was enough to flunk the physical.
For a kid who grew up dreaming of rockets, this was a crushing blow.
But then Lovell gets a second chance.
NASA comes calling again, looking for pilots.
They didn't know that I flunked a physical and I wasn't going to tell them, and I said sure, and the doctors there didn't even know what a high biller -ruin was, and I passed them.
No problem. Before long, he's going to space.
During this time, Lovell is kind of one of NASA's guinea pigs.
He goes on a 2 -week mission because that's how long it would take to go to the moon and back.
NASA wants to see if a human being can survive 14 days in zero -gravity.
So Lovell floats around for 2 weeks and helps NASA figure out — yes, it can be done.
Then he flies on another mission.
… trying to figure out how it's possible to work outside the spacecraft while you are in orbit.
And then… We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard." President Kennedy says he wants to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, so the Apollo program kicks into gear.
The first mission, Apollo 1, ends in tragedy.
There's a fire on the spacecraft during a test flight.
The entire crew is killed.
But the Apollo program continues, slowly building up the expertise they'll need for a moon landing.
And by the time Apollo 8 comes around, Jim Lovell is in the pilot seat.
He and his far side and lit up the tops of the craters, and then pretty soon the sunlight bathed the entire far side of the moon — the side that we never see from the Earth of course.
Lovell and the crew of Apollo 8 are the first people ever to set eyes on the far side of the moon.
He spots a mountain on the moon's surface and names it Mount Maryland after his wife.
We were like three schoolboys looking at that at the time.
It looked like a grand oasis in the vastness of space.
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Because out here, the only requirement is having fun.
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Imagine if you could ask someone anything you wanted about their finances.
How much do you make?
Who paid for that fancy dinner?
What did your house actually cost?
On every episode of What We Spend, a different guest opens up their wallets, opens up their lives, really, and tells us all about their finances.
For one week, they tell us everything that they spend their money on.
My son slammed like, six dollars for the blueberries in five minutes.
This is a podcast about all the ways money comes into our lives and then leaves again, which of course we all have a lot of feelings about.
I really want these things.
I want to own a house.
I want to have a child.
But this morning I really wanted a coffee.
Because whatever you are buying or not buying or saving or spending at the end of the day, money is always about more than your balance.
I'm Courtney Harrell and this is what we spend.
Listen to and follow What We Spend, an Odyssey original podcast. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.
A few years later, when the Apollo 11 mission finally lands on the moon, Jim Lovell is watching from Earth.
He was Neil Armstrong's backup.
Then comes Apollo 12, which is sort of the forgotten middle child of the Apollo missions.
And then came lucky number 13.
The mission here was to land on the moon's surface and do some scientific research, collect some geological samples that might help them figure out the origins of the moon.
This time Lovell is the commander.
If you can imagine being a kid that was interested in spaceflight, rockets, and all that, this was sort of the epitome of my career, what else could I want?
By the time they got to 13, NASA had the plan locked down.
There'd be a three -man crew, Commander Lovell, he's in charge, and then two pilots, Ken Mattingly and Fred Haise.
The spacecraft itself was very similar to the ones from Apollo's 11 and 12.
It had three main parts.
They'll become important later.
There was the command module, where the crew would do most of their navigation, and the service module, which had lots of equipment and support systems in it.
Together, those two parts were named Odyssey.
And then there was the lunar module named Aquarius.
That was the part of the ship that Lovell and Hays were gonna ride down to the moon's surface.
The team works together for months, preparing for the mission.
Things are going well.
But then... If you're super -sicious, this is a spacecraft for you because all sorts of little things happened on 13 that you wouldn't think possible, but they did.
So, what, like what?
Well, first of all, we were getting ready to go and the crew, just a few days before the flight, was exposed to the measles.
The measles. Lovell and Hayes have both already had the measles, so they're safe.
But Ken Mattingly, the Command Module pilot, he never had it as a kid, and NASA decides they have to bring in a replacement.
Just a couple days before the flight, the three of us had to sit down and spend hours after hours just getting Jack up to speed as the command module pilot.
Jack Swigert. He's going to be piloting the spacecraft from Earth to the Moon.
When the day comes, he's ready.
Everything is ready.
Three, two, one, zero.
and we have liftoff at 213.
Apollo 13 blasts off at 1313 without a hitch. This is my fourth flight into space.
So I was not really nervous, because this was oh -hat to me.
But as they're still exiting the Earth's atmosphere, something strange happens.
One of the five engines on the ship suddenly shuts down.
The astronauts can't figure out why – so they call down to mission control in Houston.
But mission control is plugged in to everything happening on the ship.
Jim, Houston, we don't have a story on why the inboard out was early, but the other engines are go and you're go.
Roger. So, we breathe a sigh of relief.
And I told my companions.
I said, you know, almost every flight has something go wrong with it.
This was our thing that went wrong with it and I think we're still OK.
We all breathe a sigh of relief but the bad things are behind us.
They had good reason to hope the worst was behind them, because the next thing they're going to do is something NASA has never tried before.
Apollo's 11 and 12 landed on the Moon, but they didn't go anywhere very geologically interesting.
Apollo 13 though is trying to land in a different place, one that's more geologically rich. But to land at the top spot we got off the free return course to another course.
Okay. Free return course.
To explain this, first, remember that when something pushes off in space, it just keeps going in that direction.
There's no wind or friction, so objects keep moving on whatever path they're on.
And there's one particular path they can take that makes getting home much easier.
If they blast off toward the moon at a specific angle, then they'll end up getting caught in the moon's orbit, and they can use that orbit to slingshot them around the moon, and back toward Earth without having to use any extra fuel.
Free trip home is kind of amazing.
Apollo's 11 and 12 both took the free -return course the whole way, but 13 can't, because they're landing in a different place in the moon's northern hemisphere—a place called Fra Mauro.
So early on in the trip, they fire their rockets, pushing the ship onto a slightly different trajectory.
Now they're heading towards their destination, but if something goes wrong, there is no free ride back to Earth.
About a day after liftoff, this maneuver is all done, and the crew has the closest thing they're gonna get to downtime.
Hello, Houston. Apollo 13.
13, Houston. Go ahead.
We're having lunch right now and I just made myself a hot dog sandwich with ketchup.
Very tasty. That's correct.
Thirteen. As I recall the flight planning, you're supposed to put mustard on the hot dogs and not ketchup, but I guess we'll overlook that.
Things are obviously going smoothly.
On the morning of day three, Houston asked the crew to do a routine check.
Thirteen, we've got one more item for you when you get a chance.
We'd like you to stir up your cryo tanks.
OK, stand by. Those cryotanks are full of oxygen, which the astronauts need to breathe obviously, but it's also used for fuel.
It gets mixed with hydrogen and that creates electricity to power the ship so they can get home.
It also creates water that the crew will drink.
So, Jack Swigert starts stirring the cryotanks.
At that particular time, Fred Haise and I were in the Horner module and I was coming back down through the tunnel when suddenly the bang occurred.
I couldn't figure out what that was, there was a sharp bang and things rocked back and forth for a while.
I looked up at Fred Hayes to see if he knew what caused the noise and I could tell from his expression, he had no idea and then I looked down at Jack Slicard in his command module and his eyes were as wide as sloshers, he had no idea.
And I could see that this was the start of a long journey home.
The instruments on the spacecraft are going crazy — alarms sounding, warning lights flashing, and the pressure on the oxygen tank is plummeting.
And then Captain Lovell looks out the window.
looked out the side as I could see a flying spray, v -shaped spraying out into space, and at a really high rate of speed, it seemed to me.
And of course that answered the question.
He knows what this is.
I'm losing all my oxygen.
One of the tanks must have exploded somehow.
We had to do something fairly soon.
He realizes they aren't going to land on the moon.
And if they don't act fast, they're not going to make it home.
The answer was obvious, we'd have to use the lunar module as a lifeboat somehow in some way to get home.
They had to get out of the dying command module and get into the lunar module to survive.
They've never trained for the situation, but they have to figure it out.
We weren't prepared for the simulations that we had, it had never been designed to try to get back to the Earth.
One of the first things we had to do was to transfer information in the guidance system into the lunar module.
That was a little bit of, you know, arithmetic work to do that.
There's all this information on the command module computers that they need on the computers in the lunar module.
Frustratingly, those two computers used different coordinate systems. So Lovell has to translate the data by hand, while his ship is literally breaking down around him.
He does these calculations and puts the results into the computer one by one.
Once he's done that, they have to shut down the command module computers as quickly as possible to save power.
We had to be very careful about what we're using and how to shut off things that we didn't think were required.
They don't even turn on the emergency warning system — they'll have to rely on mission control to tell them if something else goes wrong.
Within a couple of hours, they're hunkered down in the lunar module, still on course for that remote spot on the moon.
We're going to plan to make a free return.
So how do you feel about making a 16 foot per second burn in 37 minutes?
Well, we'll give it a try, Jack, because that's all we got.
They need to get back on the free return trajectory, the free trip home.
Fuel is really scarce at this point, so they need all the help they can get.
But when Captain Lovell tries to steer the spaceship from the lunar module… It was somewhat like if you're driving a car down the road and you want to go right, you turn the wheel left. And, of course, the doorbell, at that time, attached to the lunar module, was a 60 ,000 -pound dead bass, a command service module.
The ship was never designed to be steered from the lunar module, especially with the rest of the ship still attached.
Not only that, but with the guidance systems powered down, Lovell needs to navigate by the stars.
He uses a tool kind of like the ones that old sea captains would, a sextant, which is a special sort of telescope.
He can use it to look at the stars and figure out his position.
The problem is, the accident has left debris floating around outside, little pieces of foil from the ship's exterior.
So when I looked outside the windows, I saw not only the stars, but I saw also all this other debris hanging out.
And it's hard to figure out what's a star and what's a piece of foil.
They're moving at thousands of miles an hour, but there's no gravity.
So the debris just hangs there.
Lovell has to figure out his position using only the sun, the moon, and the Earth.
Those are the only three objects that he can see clearly.
Finally, he makes his move.
The ship is back on the free -return trajectory.
Soon they begin to loop around the moon.
This is Captain Lovell's second trip through this particular patch of space, and this time is different.
— I didn't pay much attention to the moon on the second round like the first time when I had plenty of time as we over to the moon on Apollo 8 to look at it.
— He does glance down for just a second to see one important landmark—the mountain he named after his wife on his last trip around the moon.
As the crew floats along in the lunar module, there is a problem building up.
Literally. A light had come on in the lunar module, a little orange light, which essentially said that the carbon dioxide biomas built it up into a dangerous amount.
The crew is breathing in their precious supply of oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide, CO2, is toxic.
And, ultimately, CO2 overload is fatal.
There are these canisters that are supposed to absorb the excess CO2, but the ones on the lunar module are wearing out.
The lunar module is designed to hold two men for two days, not three men for four days.
There are other canisters on the command module, but they aren't the same shape.
The command module's canisters are square, the lunar module's are round.
So, command module filters won't fit in the round ports on the lunar module.
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Down on the ground, mission control gets to work.
You may remember this if you've seen the movie, all those spare parts poured out onto a table.
They have to figure out how do we get these square canisters to fit into these round holes, using only the materials that are already on board?
They worked out a system and then they re -lighted it up to us word -by -word, hose, duct tape, and an old sock.
And my gosh that was the one thing that kept us from dying.
When the astronauts make it around the moon, they fire their engines one more time — burning precious fuel.
This speeds up the ship while they slingshot out of orbit.
Burning the rockets for 5 minutes will save them 10 hours on their trip, which is crucial.
Because they're running low on water, they cut their consumption by half, each of them gets 6 oz a day, and they're not eating much. We really didn't care about food in our condition, I mean, you could go without food for a long time.
Lovell loses 14 pounds on the trip, Hayes gets sick, and it's cold.
They've shut off the heat to conserve power, so it's 38 degrees Fahrenheit inside the ship.
Two days after they leave the moon's orbit, they're getting close to Earth.
As we were on our way home, of course, the Earth is getting bigger and bigger, and mission control told us that they would give us procedures for powering up the command module, which was the only device that was going to enter the atmosphere.
Re -entry into the atmosphere is one of the most dangerous parts of any mission.
You're going really fast, creating tons of heat.
There's a heat shield on the command module that's supposed to protect them, but the crew had no idea whether it had been damaged in the explosion.
Also, they have to get the angle of entry just right.
Too shallow, you bounce off the Earth's atmosphere.
A NASA scientist we talked to said, it's like a stone skipping on water.
But too steep, and you cause too much friction, incinerating the ship.
Plus, the Apollo 13 crew has to lose the lunar module and get all the command module systems back online.
So Mission Control is working crazy hours on the ground getting the instructions ready.
They kept delaying and delaying and delaying it.
When I got kind of mad, we said, you know, we got to have those procedures.
Seventeen hours before splashdown, they get their instructions.
A familiar voice comes on the radio to read them.
Hello, Aquarius. Houston.
How do you raise? OK, very good, Ken.
OK, let me take us from the top here.
Ken Mattingly, the astronaut who had to sit the mission out in case he got the measles.
By the way, he never got sick.
It's not just Ken. A bunch of people from Mission Control came up with this plan, and they're all chiming in.
It takes more than three hours to read off all the instructions.
But finally... Houston, Aquarius, the track center in the command module now.
OK, Jim. The crew leaves their lunar module lifeboat, they power up the command module, they eject the service module, and when they do, they can see the damage from the explosion for the first time.
And there's one whole side of that big, big thing.
They'll later find out that the blast was caused by one little faulty wire that shorted out and sparked an explosion.
The whole panel is blown out almost from the base to the entrance.
Now there's nothing to do but wait.
Hope the heat shield isn't damaged.
Hope the parachutes they'll need haven't frozen into blocks of ice.
They hit the atmosphere in a roar of fire.
The heat shield starts flaking off into flames, and it forms a sphere of gas around the surface.
spacecraft that prevents communication.
This is the way it usually works.
But on Apollo 13, this ionization goes on longer than normal.
The communication blackout is supposed to last three or four minutes.
We're just burning up through the atmosphere.
Four minutes go by.
Then five. Then six.
The parachutes did not freeze.
the heat shield was not damaged, and the astronauts splash down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
They get picked up by a Navy ship, the USS Iwo Jima.
It's not until they're on board that they realize their trip has been big news.
We were very happy that people had thought about us.
I was hoping that someone would think about us besides our families.
In fact, the whole world has been waiting to hear whether these three astronauts would make it home.
Apollo 13 ends up rejuvenating the public's interest in the Apollo program as a whole.
Captain Lovell told us if he could go back and prevent the explosion and walk on the moon, he wouldn't.
The best thing that could have happened to NASA was for 13 to have the explosion.
It showed what could be done in cooperation and good leadership and teamwork, to work together on that situation.
So in that respect, it probably be as a milestone to young people that can say that, hey, if I run into a problem, all I need to do is sit back and figure things out to see how best I can overcome them.
Thanks for listening to History This Week.
For more moments throughout history that are also worth watching, check your local TV listings to find out what's on history today.
This podcast is produced by McKamey Lin, Julie Magruder, Ben Dickstein, and me, Sally Helm.
Our editor and sound designer is Dan Rosato and our researcher is Emma Fredericks.
Our executive producers are Jesse Katz and Ted Butler.
Thanks today to John Ury, a NASA scientist and historian who walked us through this whole story.
Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review History This Week, wherever you get your podcasts.
And we will see you next week.
