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The three astronauts of Apollo 13 were commander Jim Lovell, lunar module pilot Fred Haise, and command module pilot Jack Swigert. The Apollo 13 astronauts would never have made it home safely if they hadn’t figured out a way to remove carbon dioxide from the air. With the help of engineers on the ground, they jury-rigged a square canister from the command module to fit into the round holes of the lunar module’s environmental system. With the world anxiously watching, Apollo 13, a U.S. lunar spacecraft that suffered a severe malfunction on its journey to the moon, safely returns to Earth.
However, when they reached the moon’s surface, they discovered that the land was actually a fake. The spacecraft had been created by the United States government in the early 1960s. As Apollo 13 approached Earth, it jettisoned both the service module and the lunar module.
Did Apollo 13 make it back?
The CM was shut down but would have to be brought back on-line for Earth reentry. The LM was designed to ferry astronauts from the orbiting CM to the moon’s surface and back again; its power supply was meant to support two people for 45 hours. If the crew of Apollo 13 were to make it back to Earth alive, the LM would have to support three men for at least 90 hours and successfully navigate more than 200,000 miles of space. A routine stir of an oxygen tank ignited damaged wire insulation inside it, causing an explosion that vented the contents of both of the SM's oxygen tanks to space. Without oxygen, needed for breathing and for generating electric power, the SM's propulsion and life support systems could not operate. The CM's systems had to be shut down to conserve its remaining resources for reentry, forcing the crew to transfer to the LM as a lifeboat.
Mission control built an impromptu adapter out of materials known to be onboard, and the crew successfully copied their model. In reality, astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert did return home safely through a complicated rescue effort by the crew, Mission Control and teams around the world. The center of gravity, instead of being in the center of the lunar module like it is normally, was way out in left field someplace, and if I wanted to go right, it went someplace else. But then about, I don’t know, 20 hours after we were taking off, going from the Earth to the Moon, they called up and said, “Look, we’ve looked at your situation. When you get around to starting to go down to land on Fra Mauro, we’ve kind of figured out that the Sun is gonna be just above you. So we’re gonna get you off that free-return and put you on a course that when you get around and start landing, you’ll start to see the craters and the shadows and things like that.” So that’s fine.
How long did it take Apollo 13 to get back to earth?
A later investigation showed that the crew’s technological problems began long before they took flight. A design flaw in the No. 2 tank and mishandling of the equipment, which had originally been assigned to Apollo 10 and later removed to serve Apollo 13, laid the seeds of the spacecraft’s problems. Furthermore, after a pre-flight procedure in which workers tested the oxygen tanks at Kennedy Space Center, there was a problem emptying one tank, so they decided to use an electric heater to “boil off” the rest of the oxygen. The process caused significant damage to the electrical systems in the tank, melting away Teflon insulation that protected its inner wiring. As the mission neared its end, re-starting the command module for re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere was a challenge never before attempted.
Apollo 14 was launched on January 31, 1971 and successfully completed the third human landing on the Moon. The signal could have shown a problem, or could have indicated the hydrogen just needed to be resettled by heating and fanning the gas inside the tank. That procedure was called a "cryo stir", and was supposed to stop the supercold gas from settling into layers.
Review board
But Apollo 13 carried an oxygen tank with a troubled history. The tank had been damaged in testing, but the spacecraft builders were not aware of a problem. The cylindrical service module had six pie-slice sectors. Apollo 13’s mission was to explore the hilly upland Fra Mauro region of the Moon. When an oxygen tank aboard the service module exploded, it ended hopes of a lunar landing.
About a week or two weeks after we got picked up in Hawaii and then we came back, we had a big press conference of course. All the NASA people came in and all the reporters came in, and TV people and stuff like that, and a lot of the families came in to listen to the whole thing. We were in the auditorium down in the Johnson Space Center. It turned out that the son of a flight controller also worked for Ron Howard, and his job was to go through all the books and the scripts and everything that people handed him, to see if they’re worthwhile making a movie. He saw this manuscript, which was not completed, and he went to Ron Howard and he said, “Look at this.
Even before they left the launching pad in Florida the mission seemed jinxed, with one astronaut, Tom Mattingly, becoming seriously ill and subsequently grounded, even though he was fully trained and ready to go. It meant that his replacement, Jack Swigert, had only a brief time to familiarize himself with the other astronauts, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise, and the lunar module’s operations. The LM carried enough oxygen, but that still left the problem of removing carbon dioxide, which was absorbed by canisters of lithium hydroxide pellets. The LM's stock of canisters, meant to accommodate two astronauts for 45 hours on the Moon, was not enough to support three astronauts for the return journey to Earth. The CM had enough canisters, but they were of a different shape and size to the LM's, hence unable to be used in the LM's equipment.
The normal procedure, in lunar orbit, was to release the LM and then use the service module's RCS to pull the CSM away, but by this point, the SM had already been released. Grumman, manufacturer of the LM, assigned a team of University of Toronto engineers, led by senior scientist Bernard Etkin, to solve the problem of how much air pressure to use to push the modules apart. The astronauts applied the solution, which was successful.
With the lunar landing canceled, mission controllers worked to bring the crew home alive. Apollo 13 was NASA’s third moon-landing mission, but the astronauts never made it to the lunar surface. During the mission’s dramatic series of events, an oxygen tank explosion almost 56 hours into the flight forced the crew to abandon all thoughts of reaching the moon.
Jim Lovell , Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise pose for their official portrait. Swigert had just replaced Ken Mattingly as command module pilot after Mattingly was exposed to German measles. The near-disaster of Apollo 13 was a stunning reminder of the perils of human spaceflight and how NASA, through ingenuity and perseverance, managed to overcome the incident and save the mission's three-man crew. In 1995, director Ron Howard would retell the Apollo 13 story in the film "Apollo 13" starring Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell. The LM did not have enough carbon-dioxide-scrubbing chemical canisters to keep the air breathable for three men all the way back to Earth. The astronauts had to build a crude adapter using spare parts on board, to make use of canisters meant for the command module.
Many wondered whether fixing problems on Earth demanded more attention than exploring the Moon. On April 15, 1970, Apollo 13 was 254 km from the lunar surface on the far side of the moon—and 400,171 km above the Earth’s surface, meaning the crew of Apollo 13 set a Guinness World Record for the farthest distance from Earth reached by humans. The crew went on one-fifth water rations and endured cabin temperatures a few degrees above freezing to conserve energy.
After an explosion crippled the spacecraft, the three astronauts had to fight to make their way back to Earth. He and the rest of the crew – Jim Lovell and Fred Haise – were then “bumped up” a mission to Apollo 13 due to training considerations. Just days before Apollo 13 lifted off in April 1970, Mattingly was exposed to German measles through backup crew member Charles Duke. U.S. spaceflight Apollo 13 was launched on April 11, 1970. So we had to figure out a way of getting rid of the carbon dioxide, which Mission Control did.
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