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“Houston, we’ve had a problem here…”
– Apollo 13, on the 13th of April, 1970
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Oxygen Tank No. 2 exploded.
Oxygen Tank No. 1 also failed.
Three astronauts—close to their intended mission of landing on the moon, but about 200,000 miles away from Earth—were suddenly left with a spaceship that had lost its normal supply of electricity, light, heat, and water.
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Astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise reported the bad news to Mission Control, in Houston, Texas, just after they had wished everyone a nice evening and said goodnight.
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| The Lunar Module |
The astronauts had to use the resources of the Lunar Module as a “lifeboat”…
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| This is Swigert helping to jury-rig equipment to keep the astronauts alive. |
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| Mission Control celebrates na safe splashdown. |
…and they had to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, following directions that engineers radioed from Mission Control. Finally, after six long days in cold, dim, hardship conditions, with Haise suffering from a urinary tract infection due to lack of water, the astronauts reached Earth, safely re-entered the atmosphere, and splashed down.
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Naturally, the Apollo 13 astronauts didn’t get to land and walk on the moon, as they’d planned. As a matter of fact, none of the three were ever able to go back to the moon. Jim Lovell had earlier flown with Apollo 8 to the moon and back to Earth (no problems on that flight–but it was never meant to land) — so he is the only person ever to have flown to the moon twice and never landed.
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The best way to celebrate NASA’s most dramatic “successful failure,” IMO, is to watch the movie Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell.
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You may want to look at the concepts and questions brought up by the movie, here.
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If you can’t get the movie, you could read About-dot-com’s interesting account of the mission here.
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