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Q. I know NASA has been celebrating the
50th anniversary of the first astronauts to step on the moon. Wasn’t there another famous space flight to the moon? I think they made a movie about it.
A. This patron was remembering the 1995 film, “Apollo 13” starring Tom Hanks. Here’s the memorable quote from that film: “Houston, we have a problem.”
For information on Apollo 13, we’ll turn to the “The Handy Space Answer Book” by Phillis Engelbert and Diane L. Dupuis: “On April 13,1970, when Apollo 13 was more than halfway to the moon, an explosion occurred.
“The crew, astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise, soon learned that the oxygen tanks had ruptured and most of the ship’s systems had been destroyed. They had to give up their goal of landing on the moon and instead focus all their energies on making it back to Earth alive.
“The accident occurred 56 hours into the flight. A crew member had unknowingly triggered the explosion by stirring the tanks of liquid oxygen, a routine procedure. Investigators later discovered that weeks before the flight, while the spacecraft sat at Cape Canaveral, the wiring in an oxygen tank had been damaged. Thus, when the tanks were stirred, the faulty wiring shorted out and started a fire.
“The flames heated the oxygen to boiling, which created enough pressure to burst the tank apart. Hot gas then entered the service module, the portion of the vessel containing supplies and equipment. The drastic increase in pressure there also caused an explosion, blowing out one wall of the unit.
“At that point, the spacecraft jerked forward and alarms went off. At first, the crew was aware only that the fuel cells used to produce electricity were not operating properly. But when they looked out the window and saw that the oxygen gas they needed to survive was blowing into space, they realized they had a much larger problem on their hands.
“There was nothing the Apollo 13 astronauts could do to repair the damage to their spacecraft. Their only hope was to ride out the journey home in the lunar module, which had life support systems of its own.
“The lunar module was not intended, however, to keep three people alive for three and one-half days. It was meant only to supply two people for two days. Oxygen, electricity and water all had to be conserved to last the entire journey home. The cabin temperature was maintained at just above freezing and each crew member could drink only six ounces of water a day.
“After the explosion on board the spacecraft, the astronauts and their supporting engineers at mission control in Houston, Texas, scrambled to figure out how to use the lunar module’s engine to bring Apollo 13 home and how to stretch its limited power supplies.
“The decision was made that the spacecraft should loop around the moon, using its gravitational field like a slingshot to send the ship back toward Earth. As the spacecraft finally approached Earth, the astronauts climbed back into the command module from the lunar module and cast off the service and lunar modules.
“They had only very basic navigational methods with which to determine their point of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. If they had been off by even a small amount, the ship would have bounced off the atmosphere and back out into space.
“Fortunately, the calculations made by the astronauts and their controllers were correct. After a few very tense minutes during re-entry when all contact with them was lost, the crew radioed the command center to announce they had splashed down.
“Apollo 13 might very well have ended in tragedy if not for the cool-headedness of the crew and engineers and their ability to quickly improvise new methods of spacecraft operation.”
If you’d like to read more, I suggest “Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13” written by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. We also have a number of children’s books on this subject.
