This Day in History April 17, 1970: A Successful Failure
Home: The Earth as seen from Apollo 13
On April 13, 1970, the three-man crew of the Apollo 13 lunar mission heard a loud bang and noticed they were leaking a gas from their ship into space. The gas was their oxygen supply and they were 200,000 miles from earth hurtling toward the moon. Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert suddenly had a new mission that would not include stepping on the surface of the moon. The explosion in an oxygen tank led to a cascading series of potentially catastrophic events. The team would need to find a way to navigate their damaged ship back to earth with decreased oxygen, reduced electricity, a dwindling water supply, and a worrying increase of carbon dioxide with each breath they took.
With now famous words, Lovell communicated their increasingly dire predicament back to NASA: "Houston, we've had a problem..."
The image below is Houston: Mission Operation Control Room shown right before the explosion.
Look at all those bright blinking buttons and flashing computer screens with streams of data. While the peak of technology at the time, they seem like something from the set of a cheap sci-fi movie. And, with all the real estate these beige banks of computing power take up, they can't begin to compete with the little gadget in your pocket. But still, with these computers, and their own creativity and ingenuity, NASA scientists had shot these astronauts into space and would now work with the Apollo 13 crew to return them home with depleted resources and reduced fuel, all while fighting the increasing creep of carbon dioxide in the astronaut's quarters. In fact, in a stunning maneuver, to return Apollo 13 home, the crew navigated around the moon and used its gravitational pull to propel the ship back to Earth, traveling the farthest from our planet that any human has ever gone.
Millions of people around the world were captivated by the drama of Apollo 13, watching their grainy television sets anxiously to find out if the crew would make it back home alive. This was the third lunar mission, less than a year since Neil Armstrong took a giant leap for mankind, and somehow the wonder of that miracle - just look up at that pale glowing orb in the sky and think, people walked there, left their footprints on its surface! - somehow even that had become mundane, and interest in the Apollo missions had faded. Footprints on the moon, supercomputers in our back pockets - we grow bored quickly with the marvelous. But now, people's lives were at stake, as they floated somewhere in the impossible eternity of space in a damaged and depleted vessel.
And so they watched their televisions, some 40 million Americans, staring at their flickering screens for updates, perhaps glancing out their windows upward into the sky to get a bearing for the immensity of the journey, the peril of the crew. They boomeranged around the moon, aligned their landing by sight and prepared to return to Earth. Their ship burned up in the atmosphere as they made their approach at about 24,000 miles per hour. An eerie three minutes of silence passed at Mission Control as the intense heat of re-entry blanked out their radio signals. Finally, over the Pacific, somewhere off the coast of Samoa, there was a burst of red and white parachutes followed by a gentle splash.
Lovell, Haise and Swigert were located and rescued in record time by the carrier USS Iwo Jima. The scores of NASA scientists who had designed and orchestrated the rescue plans celebrated wildly at Mission Control. Millions of Americans sighed in relief. President Nixon presented all three astronauts the Medal of Freedom. Tom Hanks would ultimately star as Lovell in an Oscar-nominated movie about their journey.
It's a good story with a happy ending, what NASA called a "successful failure". Celebrations were scheduled to commemorate the mission's fiftieth anniversary this spring. Of course, those celebrations didn't happen. Haise and Lovell are sheltering in place like the rest of us. Still, NASA has a great online exhibit to enjoy.
How quickly our certain plans falter in the face of the radically unexpected, and how unexpected the outcomes of our plans. Jack Swigert, the third astronaut on the trip, wasn't even supposed to be on the mission. Ken Mattingly had trained to be the third member of Apollo 13, but three days before launch he was quarantined after an exposure to the rubella virus. Watching the launch carry Swigert into space must have been devastating. But then the explosion, and Mattingly was there in Mission Control helping craft the plan to get the team home.
Mattingly never did get sick. And, two years later he landed on the moon as part of Apollo 16, accomplishing what Swigert never did. Had he not been quarantined, Mattingly would never have stepped on the surface of the moon. Swigert left NASA and later ran for office in Colorado in 1978. He lost in the primary, but when he ran for office again, in 1982, he won with over 60% of the vote. He died of cancer that December, days before assuming office.
Ever since he learned about Neil Armstrong's moon landing during last summer's fiftieth commemoration, my son Ansel has been obsessed with rocket ships. He sleeps with a stuffed space shuttle he got from the Museum of Flight. And recently my one-year-old daughter Zoe has become obsessed with the moon. Just mention the word, and she begins craning her neck upward to try to catch a glimpse. The moon's pull on their imagination is powerful. And, caught in quarantine, I too find renewed interest in the moon, its pristine stillness so far from this whole terrestrial mess.
But the lunar missions were always, ultimately, about home, not escape. Astronaut Bill Anders, who trained with Mattingly as backup for the Apollo 11 crew, flew in the first manned flight to reach and orbit the moon, Apollo 8, in 1968. On this flight he snapped what has become one of the most influential photographs of all time: Earthrise.
As Anders later said, "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." Looking back from the moon, Anders saw a small, fragile, beautiful bauble floating in the darkness. It's everything we have. Or, as Lovell, who used the moon's literal pull to hurtle his damaged ship back to Earth, said, "We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it."
As the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day approaches, first celebrated just five days after the successful return of the Apollo 13 crew, I hope we might remember that here, on our planet, people's lives are at stake, as we float somewhere in the impossible eternity of space in a damaged and depleted vessel.
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