Apollo 13

Previously published as “Lost Moon”

By Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger

It had been just under two years since the fire in the cockpit that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, and the memories of that day were only now beginning to fade. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were not the first American crew to fly in space in those twenty-three months; the first had been Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham just eight weeks earlier, and that day, the reminders of the lost crew had been everywhere. Though Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham were the first men ever to pilot an Apollo spacecraft, their mission was officially known as Apollo 7. There had been five unmanned Apollo flights previously, and these had been designated Apollos 2 through 6.

Before the fire, Grissom, White, and Chaffee had informally claimed the Apollo 1 honorific for themselves, but NASA officials had not yet given their O. K. Two of the unmanned flights had actually preceded the dead crewmen’s scheduled mission, and the best the astronauts could technically have hoped for was Apollo 3. After the fire, however, the sentiment within NASA changed, and the Agency decided to grant the astronauts’ wishes posthumously, permanently retiring the Apollo 1 name.

(Lovell and Kluger 2000, 28)

Sy Liebergot was accustomed to ratty data. He didn’t like it – nobody did. But he was accustomed to it. Liebergot, like every other controller, lived and died by the data on his screen.

To the untrained eye, the glowing glyphs that were the stuff of Liebergot’s day would make not a shred of sense. But to a controller, the numbers on the monitor meant that the little canister of people he had helped flying a quarter of a million miles away from home was either doing fine and buttoned up tight, which was very good, or not doing fine and not buttoned up tight, which was very bad. If things were not doing fine, it meant that the people in the canister might never return from the celestial ether they had intended simply to visit, and the folks on the ground would want to know if it was your glowing glyphs that had started acting funny and if maybe you should have spotted them earlier. So when the data on the screens started getting ratty, Liebergot and everyone else got uneasy.

It’s not as if nobody knew what the occasional rattiness was about.In fact, they could even predict it. It would happen when an Apollo spacecraft orbiting the moon disappeared behind the far side. It would happen when a Gemini capsule orbiting the Earth passed between the friendly footprints of two tracking stations. It would happen when a Mercury capsule broke out of orbit and went shrieking into the atmosphere at 17,000 miles per hour, trailing a cloud of hot, angry, signal-garbling ions.

In all these cases, transmissions streaming from the ship would be turned pretty much to hash, but before they disappeared altogether, they’d get, well, kind of ratty. Maybe your screen glyphs would tell you that the cabin pressure had suddenly dropped to zero; or maybe it would tell you that a hydrogen tank had just blown a seal, eating itself in a pressure explosion and taking part of the ship with it; or that a couple of fuel cells had just gone south on you; or that the heat shield had slipped; or that the thrusters were busted. Most likely they weren’t, most likely it was just ratty data – but if they were right, that could be it for the canister. The problem was, you’d never know for sure what the story was until the Gemini was in touch with the next station, or the Mercury had cleared its ion storm, or the Apollo had come around to the sunny side of the street.

(Lovell and Kluger 2000, 74-75)

Apart from the protocol man, the only other direct connection Marilyn had to the Space Center during the long days of the mission was a squawk box NASA had hooked up in her bedroom three days earlier. The box served as a listen-only intercom that allowed an astronaut’s wife to monitor the communications between her husband and the Capcom around the clock.

Better than 90 percent of what families could ever hope to hear on this party line was incomprehensible — a lot of numbers and vectors that even the flight controllers themselves occasionally found tedious. But Marilyn and the other wives were listening less for the words than they were for the tone, the trouble tone, and for this the box could be indispensable.