Disaster Strikes! by Jeffrey Kluger

Author:Jeffrey Kluger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Courtesy of NASA

The Apollo 13 service module, seen after it was jettisoned by the crew. An entire panel on the module had been blown off by an explosion four days earlier.

EIGHT

EXPLOSION IN SPACE

Apollo 13, 1970

IT WAS NEVER easy to get Jim Lovell angry, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. And right about then, the commander of Apollo 13 could have pitched Fred Haise straight out into space. Lovell was a veteran of three other space flights and had never before felt like tossing a crewmate overboard. And he was unlikely to stay mad for long. But at the moment, Haise had gotten under his skin.

It had been an exceedingly pleasant two days—actually two days, seven hours and forty-five minutes, according to the mission clock. That was how long it had been since the Apollo 13 crew had lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now they were 200,000 miles from Earth, just 40,000 miles from the moon and just a day and a half away from landing on its surface in the Fra Mauro formation, south of the lunar equator.

Lovell was flying with two rookies this trip—Haise in the right-hand seat and Jack Swigert in the center. It was Haise who would be traveling down to the surface with Lovell in the LEM, which the crew had nicknamed Aquarius. Swigert would be remaining in lunar orbit, station-keeping in the command module Odyssey.

More so than most astronauts, Lovell was never so happy as when he was in space, and never so happy in space as when he was in command of a mission. It wasn’t just that he liked the feel of being in charge of a spacecraft. He also liked the feel of being equal parts mentor and trail guide for his junior crewmates. At forty-two, he was only four years older than Swigert and six years older than Haise, but from the moment of liftoff he found himself looking after the first-timers, helping them to manage the challenges of traveling in space, as well as appreciate the singular joys.

“Jack, be careful in your movements now,” he warned shortly after the spacecraft reached Earth orbit and Swigert unbuckled from his seat and began drifting around the cabin. Newcomers to the roomy Apollo spacecraft often got space-sick when they first began to move about in zero-g; Lovell himself had had to take some steadying breaths and keep his eyes ahead when he flew to the moon on Apollo 8’s lunar orbital mission seventeen months earlier.

Even before the current crew got to space, there were lessons for the commander to teach. Lovell was prepared for the violent way he’d be thrown forward in his seat restraints a few minutes after liftoff, when the Saturn V’s first stage cut off and the second stage lit. The rest of his crew hadn’t been.

“When that shut down, man, I thought I was going through the instrument panel,” Haise said after that phase of the mission had passed.

“I should have warned you,” Lovell answered, and he meant it.

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