Apollo 13

Preface copyright © 2000 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger

Copyright © 1994 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 0-618-05665-3

ISBN 978-0-618-05665-1

eISBN 978-0-547-52623-2

v3.1120

This book was previously published as Lost Moon.

Frontispiece: Official Apollo 13 emblem, courtesy of NASA

This true adventure is dedicated to those earthbound astronauts: my wife, Marilyn, and my children, Barbara, Jay, Susan, and Jeffrey, who shared with me the fears and anxieties of four days in April, 1970.

—JIM LOVELL

With love to my family—nuclear and extended, past and present—for providing an always stable orbit.

—JEFFREY KLUGER

Preface

THE MEN of Apollo 13 had a lot of plans for the afternoon of April 21, 1970. If the schedule ran the way it was supposed to run—and there was no reason to assume it wouldn’t—April 21 was the day they would splash down in the Pacific Ocean and climb aboard the deck of the helicopter carrier Iwo Jima, having just completed humanity’s third and most ambitious landing on the moon. Unlike Apollos 11 and 12, which had been sent to the glass-smooth plains of the Sea of Tranquillity and the Ocean of Storms, Apollo 13 would be heading for a high-wire touchdown in the moon’s Fra Mauro highlands. Negotiating a terrain that treacherous would require some sublimely good piloting, the kind that would prove not only the soundness of the translunar ships but the skill of the men who had been tapped to fly them. Pull off a mission like that, and the day you return to the familiar waters of the South Pacific ought to be a historic one indeed.

While the Apollo 13 crew—commander Jim Lovell and his rookie crewmates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise—indeed made history in the days leading up to April 21, it wasn’t the kind they had expected. The mission they flew didn’t involve pinpoint landings and memorable words and great, bounding bunny hops in the moon’s otherworldly gravity. Rather, it involved an exploding oxygen tank and a mortally wounded spacecraft and a crew marooned 200,000 miles from Earth with no right to expect they could patch their ship together again, much less turn it around and nurse it back home.

Nonetheless, the Apollo 13 astronauts did come home, hitting the ocean not on April 21 but on April 17—a four-day difference that represented the time it would have taken them to descend to the lunar surface, visit awhile, and take off again. Lovell, Swigert, and Haise could not forget how unlikely their safe return home was. But they could also not forget that those four days were something that dark fortune and flawed hardware would now forever deny them.

For a crew that had been assigned a snakebit spaceship like the flawed Apollo 13, there was always the possibility of finagling another lunar trip. It was the machines that had failed on this mission, after all, not the men. But Lovell, Swigert, and Haise instinctively knew they were not returning to space any time soon. The Apollo 13 astronauts had barely escaped with their necks during their week in space, and everyone aboard the recovery carrier realized it. The fact that they did escape was the longest of piloting long shots, and a space agency surviving on public goodwill was not about to push things now, packing the same three men into the same sort of ship, flinging them back into the void, and inviting fate to have a go at them again.

If the astronauts could not rewrite their personal story, however, they could still tell the one they had. Apollos 11 and 12 might have landed on the moon a year earlier; Apollos 8 and 10 might have orbited it before them. But no other crew—no Americans, no Soviets, not a soul who had ridden a rocket into space before—had ever come so heartstoppingly close to cashing it in out there and yet somehow managed to make it home. Refract the failed Apollo 13 mission through the right prism, and it started to look an awful lot like a success.

When the Apollo 13 crewmen were plucked from the ocean and flown to the carrier on April 17, they didn’t have much opportunity to talk. But as the afternoon wore on and the welcoming ceremonies wound down, and Lovell, Swigert, and Haise stood with a handful of carrier officers, saying their final thanks in the crisp blue jumpsuits they’d donned in the helicopter to replace the wilted white flight suits they’d been wearing for the last six days, Lovell had a moment to pull Swigert aside.

We ought to write it up, Jack, the commander said to the command module pilot. Swigert looked at him perplexed. "The story; this story, Lovell said. We ought to write it."

The idea of telling the tale of Apollo 13 was always a natural one—or at least it seemed that way to the men who had been involved in the mission. The problem was, who in the world would read it? By 1970, the United States had been flying in space for nine years, and while Americans had developed a fondness for their spacecraft and their astronauts, they had come to expect the missions to turn out one way: successfully. Oh sure, there had been that nasty bit of business back in 1961 when Gus Grissom’s Mercury 7 capsule sank in the Atlantic the moment after it splashed down. There had been that hair-raising time five years later when Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott’s Gemini 8 suddenly began pinwheeling in Earth orbit, requiring the crew to slam on the brakes and return home just ten hours into a flight that was supposed to have lasted five days. But while Gus and Neil and Dave might have known the kind of deadly mess they were in, the public—to NASA’s relief—never fully grasped it, figuring that as long as the boys got into space and came down all right, any minor scrapes they had before their feet hit the carrier deck didn’t amount to much.

It was only in 1967, when the hard-luck Grissom, along with crewmates Ed White and Roger Chaffee, were killed in a launch-pad fire aboard the Apollo 1 spacecraft, that the taxpayers picking up the check for the missions realized the mortal price tag traveling in space could carry—and they didn’t much like it. Americans might be willing to continue funding NASA’s increasingly risky cosmic expeditions, but give them too many flag-covered coffins or too many crepe-draped widows, and they just might drop the hammer on the whole operation.

For that reason as much as any other, the moment Apollo 13 returned from space, NASA did everything it could to get the nation’s mind off the near-catastrophic mission. Lovell, Swigert, and Haise got their requisite parades; Congress held its requisite hearings into the accident, determining which pieces of hardware and which prelaunch errors had led to the explosion. But after that, the space agency moved on to other things, gearing up as quickly as it could for Apollo 14 and pointing proudly to all those other magnificent Apollos that had come before. Even the Apollo 13 spacecraft itself was soon forgotten. After the command module sizzled into the Pacific, it was hauled onto the carrier deck and then shipped to California for a post-flight physical at the plant where it had been manufactured. Engineers descended on the ship, stripping its innards, testing and retesting its on-board systems to determine how well they had survived their journey and what could be done to improve them for future missions. Afterward, the gutted spacecraft was shipped to Florida where it sat, largely overlooked, as part of an out-of-the-way Cape Canaveral display. After a few years of such internal exile, it was banished even further, expatriated to France where it would be kept in an aviation museum outside Paris.

NASA, of course, was not always so skittish about the idea of risk. The American space program was born not of ambition or passion or celestial wanderlust, but rather of something closer to fear—the fear of being second best. In 1957, the Soviet Union rocked the West with the announcement that it had placed the 184-pound Sputnik satellite into orbit around the Earth. Putting a satellite that weighed 184 pounds in orbit required globe-spanning missiles that packed a propulsive punch of more than 50,000 pounds. And a nation with that kind of ballistic muscle was a fearsome thing. The United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in both the technology game and the propaganda game; if it was going to close the gap, it was going to have to ramp up fast.

In order to stake their country’s claim in space in the short time they had been given, NASA’s engineers had to develop a whole new type of engineering ethos. After 1961, when President Kennedy outrageously promised to put Americans on the moon by 1970, the space agency knew the old way of doing business had to change. The cautious customs of the aeronautical inventor would continue to be observed, but this natural reserve would be enlivened by a new willingness to gamble. So no one’s ever tried building a 36-story rocket able to accelerate a manned spacecraft to 25,000 miles per hour, fling it out of a circular Earth orbit, and send it on a screaming beeline to the moon? Then it’s about time someone did. So no one’s ever contemplated how to build a bungalow-sized, four-legged ship so flimsy it can’t even support its own weight on Earth, but so strong it can take off and land under the moon’s reduced gravity? Then maybe NASA was the place to do it. There is a thin line between arrogance and confidence, between hubris and true skill, and the engineers and astronauts of NASA spent more than a decade sure-footedly straddling it.

Much of that changed, however, after Apollo 11, America’s first manned lunar landing, in the summer of 1969. The moment NASA’s astronauts set foot on the moon’s soil, the twelve-year space race was won and the Soviets grudgingly sued for peace. Other Apollos would still be allowed to travel back to the moon for their victory laps, but the public was beginning to have its doubts. Risking the lives of astronauts now, when the moon was already tattooed with boot-prints, was a little like sending soldiers out to fight the day after an armistice has been signed. The near-death experience of Apollo 13 only confirmed the belief that further exploration of deep space was lethal folly. Even before the liftoffs of Apollos 14 through 17, in 1971 and 1972, Apollos 18 through 20, which had been poised to make their own lunar excursions, were ordered to stand down. The geologists and chemists may have seen the moon as a scientific horn of plenty, but the engineers and the public saw it as little more than a goal that had to be reached. Once it was reached, there was little purpose in repeating the feat again and again and again.

For NASA, the decades that followed were in many respects wilderness years. After the Apollo program came Skylab, an upper stage of a Saturn 5 rocket that had been refitted as a makeshift space station. In May 1973, the first Skylab crew flew up to the station in a leftover Apollo spacecraft and spent 28 days circling the planet, conducting experiments, and learning to live in orbit. In July 1973, the second crew flew up to the station in another leftover Apollo spacecraft and spent 59 days circling the planet, conducting experiments, and learning to live in orbit. In November of 1973, the third Skylab crew spent 84 days in orbit doing much the same thing. The science the astronauts brought home was good, solid stuff, but for pure exploratory octane, the missions came up mighty short.

NASA’s horizons receded even further in 1981 when the space shuttle began to fly. By any measure, the shuttle was a fantastic piece of engineering—a bona fide skyliner compared to the small, wingless pods of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo eras. But as the name of the new ship implied, its mission was a modest one. The shuttle was principally a delivery truck—a huge, multi-billion-dollar delivery truck, to be sure, one that would put such glamorous payloads as the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit; but it was a truck nonetheless. For a time, a dusting of glamour clung to the new ships, particularly during the early flights when senior astronauts like John Young and Ken Mattingly, who had earned their stripes flying the old translunar route, took the ships out for their shakedown cruises. But once the legends surrendered the stick and the new crews took over, the public began to view the shuttle flights with little more interest than they would bus departures.

But spacecraft aren’t buses, a lesson an indifferent America learned anew on January 28, 1986, when the shuttle Challenger took off for what was to be a routine mission with a routine, seven-member crew—and never came home again. For the first time since Apollo 13, blameless astronauts were betrayed by their hardware—in this case a flawed seal in a solid-fuel booster that failed catastrophically before the ship could even reach orbit. And for the first time ever, the lives of American astronauts were claimed in flight.

As with the Apollo 13 mission, hearings were convened, charges were hurled, and blame—some fair, some unfair—was assigned. NASA, most people concluded, had simply pushed its ships too hard, launching imperfect equipment in poor weather with little more on its mind than improving the shuttle fleet’s turnaround time. Cargo dispatchers make those kinds of mistakes; space explorers shouldn’t.

Disastrous as the loss of Challenger was—far more disastrous than the near loss of Apollo 13—this time few people spoke of canceling the space program. NASA, for better or worse, had shackled itself to its shuttles. Three more of the infernal machines were idling in their hangars, manufacturers were poised to build the government a fourth one, and paying customers were waiting in line to get their satellites aboard. With few other American launchers available to carry commercial payloads—and no others to carry human beings—NASA was either going to space aboard the shuttle or not going at all.

But if the space agency’s spacecraft were safe for now, its reputation was another matter. Nothing threatens a federal program like doubts about the competence of the people who run it, and the public now had doubts indeed. The engineers and flight planners who had once been the symbol of America’s Cold War preeminence—coolly cutting cards with the Soviets for dominance of the very cosmos, and ultimately drawing the high hand—now seemed to have gone fumble-fingered. In the wake of Challenger, NASA was being thought of as little more than another government agency—slow, mistake-prone, bureaucratically arthritic, the Department of Labor with niftier machines.

But NASA was not, and never could be, just another government agency. The business of exploring space may have appeared to have become dull and clumsy, stripped of the crapshoot exuberance that made it the grand adventure it once was, but it was still the business of exploring space. Put enough engineers at enough drafting tables in enough NASA facilities, and someone is almost certain to dream up something extraordinary. Quietly, in the late 1980s, extraordinary things indeed started happening. Even as the shuttles were plying their cautious trade routes from Canaveral to orbit and back to Earth again, other ships—unmanned ships—were accomplishing much more, much farther away.

Within NASA, the manned and unmanned space programs had long operated side by side, but the unmanned program had always been thought of as sort of a poor institutional relation. Little robot ships with names like Ranger and Voyager are no match for charismatic astronauts with names like Buzz and Gordo, and the machines were forever getting lost in the glamorous glare given off by the men. But with the Buzzes and Gordos long since gone, and the manned ships that still flew no longer making headlines, other space achievements slowly started making news. In 1989, the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which had been speeding through the deep freeze of deep space since 1977, reconnoitered Neptune, completing an improbable four-world tour during which it had planet-hopped from Jupiter to Saturn to Uranus. That same year, the Magellan probe took off for Venus, equipped with a high-risk flight plan and high-resolution radar that would allow it to peer through the opaque Venusian air and photograph the surface of that world for the first time. Six months later, the Galileo probe set out on a decade-long mission to Jupiter during which it would photograph the planet’s spangle of moons and fire a probe into the flank of the giant world itself.

Even as those missions were flying, other probes targeted for other destinations were being built on workbenches throughout the NASA labs. There was the Cassini mission, launched in 1997 and now en route to Saturn, which will slalom through the moons of the ringed planet and launch a probe down to the surface of the huge Saturnian moon Titan. There was the Stardust spacecraft, which will fly through the tail of a comet and bring home a sample of its pixie-dust ice. There was the Pathfinder spacecraft, which on July 4, 1997, bounced improbably down on Mars in a swaddling of air bags and released an even more improbable robot car that began toddling across the surface, sniffing rocks and sampling soil on a world where no other machine had ever budged so much as an inch from its landing spot. And there was the Hubble Space Telescope which, from the close-to-home perch of near-Earth orbit, has now spent more than a decade peering deeper into space than human or machine eyes had ever seen before.

And as the rockets went up and the data came back and the photos of all the blue and red and orange-black worlds began streaming home to Earth, a small, tectonic shift occurred in the popular consciousness. Space—despite the explosive death of Challenger, despite the plodding work of the shuttle fleet, despite the decades that had elapsed since the last human crew did anything more dramatic than orbit and orbit and orbit the Earth—was slowly becoming thrilling again.

It was in this newly adventurous environment in the 1990s that the story of Apollo 13 reemerged. If our machines could achieve greatness in deep space, there was no reason humans couldn’t once again do the same—but only if we were willing to assume equally great risks. In a business as perilous as space travel, the measure of success—and heroism and good, dramatic yarn-spinning—is not in avoiding technological breakdowns but in how engineers and astronauts handle those breakdowns when they do occur. People will die during space missions; it’s the nature of the enterprise and something the space community itself level-headedly accepts. But when you find yourself in space, eyeball to eyeball with death, and through imagination, resourcefulness, and flat-out fine flying see to it that death is the one who blinks, you’ve achieved something truly extraordinary. Measured by that yardstick, the mission of Apollo 13 deserved to be thought of as far more than the forgotten child of NASA’s lunar program; it might well have been thought of as its favorite son.

That was the point we hoped to make and the tale we hoped to tell when we set about writing Lost Moon (now Apollo 13) in 1992. In a popular environment that was intolerant of the fallibility of human beings and their machines and was content to limit space exploration to paddling about in the familiar harbor of near-Earth orbit, the tale of Apollo 13 would not have had much appeal. But by the final decade of the millennium—and the fourth decade of humanity’s travels in space—that had already begun to change. The people of the world intoxicated themselves once before on their spaceships and their spacemen, and a generation after the last Apollo astronaut returned from the moon, they appeared ready to do it again.

The truck driver who brought Apollo 13 home to Hutchison, Kansas, in 1995 knew just what it was he was carrying in his hitch. The big wooden crate that had been loaded aboard earlier in the day looked like any other wooden crate—large enough to hold a car or a bedroom’s worth of furniture. But cars and furniture aren’t welcomed at the dock when they come off the boat with the kind of ceremony this crate received. Nor do they have a government in Paris and a government in Washington keeping an eye on their welfare as they make the transatlantic crossing from France to Houston and then begin the overland journey to the American plains. Nor, finally, would a more ordinary crate have a team of restorers waiting for it at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, anxious to crack the lid and return the machine inside to its once-pristine condition.

Since 1976, Apollo 13 had been out of the country on indefinite loan. Not until 1995—when the name of the mission had once again become part of the popular lexicon and the story of its six days in space had become part of its lore—did the government at last call the banished spacecraft home. Max Ary, the founder and chief of the Kansas museum, had spent two decades collecting more than 80,000 bits and bolts from the eviscerated ship, planning for the day it might return.

On the final leg of its final journey, the Apollo spacecraft—jouncing over the 600 statute miles from Houston to Hutchison—moved a lot more slowly than it had when it covered the 500,000 miles from the Earth to the moon and back. This time, however, the ship that had suffered so grievously in space was well protected against injury: its great dish of a heat shield rested in a molded bed of Styrofoam; its scorched skin was wrapped in a layer of plastic; the big crate was hammered together around it all.

When the truck reached the museum, Ary was waiting to meet it. The driver hopped down from his cab, walked across the parking lot to meet him, and handed him a clipboard. Ary scanned the yellow tissue sheet that served as the shipment’s invoice and allowed himself a smile.

Contents, the top line read, one spacecraft.

Ary signed the sheet with a flourish. Apollo 13 was at last home.

Jim Lovell

Jeffrey Kluger

April 2000

Prologue

Monday, April 13, 1970; 10:00 P.M. Houston time

NOBODY KNEW how the stories about the poison pills got started. Most people had heard them; most people even believed them. The press and the public certainly did; even some people at the Agency did. A new person would show up for his first day on the job at NASA, meet his first crewman, and as soon as he got back to his desk would turn to the guy sitting next to him and want to know: Have you heard about the poison pills?

Stories about poison pills always made Jim Lovell laugh. Poison pills! Forget about it! There just weren’t any situations in which you’d ever really consider making, well, an early exit. And even if there were, you had lots of easier ways to do it than poison pills. The command module did have a crank for the cabin vent, after all. One turn of the handle and the 5 pounds per square inch of cozy capsule pressure would instantly be exposed to zero pounds per square inch of nasty space pressure. As the atmosphere inside rushed out and the vacuum outside rushed in, whatever air was left in your lungs would explode out in an angry rush, your blood would instantly—and literally—boil, your brain and body tissues would scream for oxygen, and your traumatized system would simply shut up shop. The whole thing would be over in just a few seconds. It was no slower, really, than some ridiculous poison pill, and it was a hell of a lot more respectable.

Of course, it wasn’t as if Lovell or anyone else had spent so much as an instant thinking about the damage the cabin vent could do. None of the crew members in the twenty-two ships that had gone up previously had ever found themselves at the point where they might even remotely consider using it. Lovell himself had been aboard three of those ships, and the only time he’d had to let the air out of the cockpit was when he was supposed to: at the end of the flight, when the spacecraft was bobbing around in the ocean and the parachutes were floating about on the water and the frogmen were closing in on the dye marker and the rescue cage was being lowered from the chopper and the band was tuning up on the carrier and he was rehearsing the little speech he might have to make before going in for a medical check, a debriefing, and a shower.

Until today, it had looked as if this trip were going to be just as routine as all the others. Actually it was, until tonight, if you were going by Houston time—although out here, close to 200,000 miles away from home and five sixths of the way to the moon, the time in south Texas seemed pointless. But whatever time it was, this trip into the nasty vacuum had turned suddenly sour. At the moment, there was almost too much going on inside the cabin for Lovell and his two crewmates to keep track of, but the things that were claiming most of their attention were their oxygen, which was almost gone, their power, which was almost spent, and their main engine, which was probably—though not certainly—dead.

It was a bad position to be in, exactly the kind of position that the press and the public and the new people at the Agency would dream up when they were in the mood to ask about the poison pills. For their part, Lovell and his crewmates weren’t thinking about pills or vents or anything of the sort. They were thinking about fixing the power, fixing the oxygen, fixing whatever else ailed the ship. Whether they actually could was open to question; no ship had ever before gotten quite so sick quite so far from home. The people in Houston felt bad about all this, and came on the line to say so.

Apollo 13, we’ve got lots and lots of people working on this, said a voice from Mission Control. We’ll get you some dope as soon as we have it, and you’ll be the first one to know.

Oh, Lovell replied, his voice revealing more irritation than he intended it to. Thank you.

Behind Lovell’s annoyance was the fact that, according to everyone’s calculations, Houston had only about an hour and fifty-four minutes to come up with their good ideas. That was all the time that was left in the cabin’s oxygen tanks. After that, the crew would slowly start rebreathing their own carbon dioxide, gasping and sweating, wide-eyed, as they strangled to death on their own waste gas in an enclosure the size of a large automobile. If that should happen, the all-at-once unpiloted craft would continue toward the moon, whipping around its far side and heading toward Earth at speeds reaching 25,000 miles per hour. Alas, it wouldn’t be aimed precisely for Earth, but instead would miss the home planet by about 40,000 miles, entering a huge, absurd, egg-shaped orbit that would send it 240,000 miles back into space, then back toward the Earth then back into space, then back toward the Earth then back into space, and on and on in a hideously pointless, hideously permanent circuit that could easily outlast the very species that launched it. With Lovell and his crewmates sealed inside, the zipping ship would remain visible to humans for millennia, enduring indefinitely as a twinkling, mocking monument to the technology of the twentieth century.

It was enough to make people start talking about the poison pills.

Monday, April 13, 11:30 P.M. eastern time

Jules Bergman buttoned his gray blazer, tightened his blue and black rep tie, and looked into the camera while the last ten seconds to airtime were counted down. The bustle around him began to quiet as it always did in the instants before a broadcast. Bergman would be getting only about a minute or so of live air for this report, and, as always with such emergency dispatches, he knew he’d have to pack a lot of information into that short sweep of the clock.

The atmosphere in the studio had been electric from the moment Bergman arrived. Nobody on the space beat expected to be here so late tonight, but when the wire services started sending news from Houston and the ABC correspondents started phoning in with their disjointed scraps of data, people seemed to stream in from everywhere. A novice might have been impressed by the alacrity with which the network’s titanic news machine could pick itself up and get itself running, but Bergman was not a novice. Just why a major news organization would even have considered shutting down its cameras and punching out for the night when a ship of astronauts was 200,000 miles from home was a complete mystery.

Bergman had been covering manned space flight since Alan Shepard’s popgun suborbital in 1961, and he had long since learned that the surest way to get your head handed to you in the space-travel business was to take it for granted that a smooth flight was going to stay smooth. Like no other newsman before him, Bergman had made it his business to learn the ways of space flight, getting himself spun in centrifuges, lofted in zero-g aircraft, and set adrift in splashdown rafts, all in the service of better understanding the tightrope the pilots walked so he could better explain it to the public that paid the bills.

The problem was, these days the public didn’t seem to want the explanations. This wasn’t Shepard’s Freedom 7 or Glenn’s Friendship 7 anymore, and it certainly wasn’t Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11—the magnificent mission that just nine months earlier had made the first landing on the surface of the moon. This was Apollo 13, the third such landing, and by the spring of 1970, both the network and the country it reported to were bored.

What ABC was showing instead of the late-breaking moon news was The Dick Cavett Show. Cavett would be talking to Susannah York, James Whitmore, and a few members of the world-champion New York Mets tonight, but for the first minutes of this evening’s show, he at least had viewers thinking about the moon.

It’s a great day in New York today, Cavett bantered with his band and his audience before his guests were introduced. It’s girl-watching weather. And speaking of girl watching, did you know our first bachelor astronaut is on his way to the moon? It’s Swigert, right? He’s the kind of guy who they say has a girl in every port. Well, that may be, but I think he’s kind of foolishly optimistic taking nylons and Hershey bars to the moon. The audience laughed along. And did you read that three million fewer viewers watched this space shot than the last one? Colonel Borman was here the other day, and he admitted that space shots are sort of losing their glamour. But in fairness, the problem might have been partly that it was a nice day and a lot of people were out, and partly that a lot of people thought the launch was a summer rerun. The audience laughed along with that, too.

While Cavett talked, Jules Bergman’s director over in the ABC news studio finished counting down from ten to one, and all at once the TV image of the talk-show host was replaced by the bright red words Apollo 13 and the bright blue words Special Report. A second later, Bergman’s face replaced the text.

The Apollo 13 spacecraft has suffered a major electrical failure, he began, leaving the astronauts in no immediate danger, but ruling out any chance of a lunar landing. Seconds after inspecting the Aquarius lunar module, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise crawled back into the command module and then reported hearing a loud bang followed by a power loss in two of their three fuel cells. They also reported seeing fuel, apparently oxygen and nitrogen, leaking from the spacecraft and also reported that gauges for those gases were reading zero. Mission Control ordered the astronauts to power down the spacecraft, cutting electrical usage while troubleshooters looked for solutions for the problems. Without all three fuel cells, the problem becomes getting enough power to fire the spacecraft’s onboard engine to get them back to Earth. Another problem still to be determined is an apparent loss of breathing oxygen in the command module. Mission Control confirms the seriousness of the problem. Repeating, the Apollo 13 astronauts are in no immediate danger, but the flight itself is in danger of being aborted.

As quickly as he appeared, Bergman vanished from the screen, replaced once again by the happy Dick Cavett. In the news studio, the bustle returned the instant the camera was shut off. The experienced space hands had reason to be less than satisfied with the news they had just broadcast. The astronauts were in no immediate danger? That was the line NASA was putting out? How you could be in no immediate danger when you were close to a quarter of a million miles from home and down to your last molecules of oxygen was unclear, but it was more than likely that the prognosis from the Agency would change soon. NASA officials were always reluctant to use the word emergency when they could get away with glitch, but when they were staring down the barrel of a full-bore crisis, they usually fessed up. Already, the New York studio was back on the phone to correspondent David Snell in Houston, to get the latest Agency line. Already, consultants from North American Rockwell, formerly North American Aviation, the builder of the Apollo spacecraft, were being asked to come to the studio to explain the problem on the air.

Across the studio, the phones began ringing with the correspondents’ latest reports from Houston, and the news crew snatched up the receivers, listened to the dispatches, and passed the updates on to Bergman. Only minutes after going on the air with his guardedly optimistic report, the newsman could see that the prognosis had indeed changed—and it was not for the better. The Apollo 13 command module, NASA’s updated statement now admitted, was completely without air or power; the astronauts, it now appeared, would have to abandon ship and make their way into the lunar module; and their lives, the Agency now conceded, were indeed endangered.

Near Bergman, the director prepped his cameramen to go back on the air. Clearly, there would be no more Dick Cavett tonight.

1

January 27, 1967

JIM LOVELL was having dinner at the White House when his friend Ed White burned to death.

Actually, it wasn’t really dinner Lovell was having, just finger sandwiches, orange juice, and unmemorable wine laid out on linen-covered tables in the Green Room. But being that the sun had already gone down and no other time was formally set aside for chow that day, this was as close to dinner as Lovell was going to get.

Actually, too, Ed White didn’t really burn to death. The fumes claimed him long before the flames ever could have. By most estimates, it was only fifteen seconds before he—along with his commander, Gus Grissom, and his junior crewmate, Roger Chaffee—succumbed to the poisons they were drawing into their lungs. In the end, it might have been for the best. Nobody knew exactly how hot it got inside the cockpit, but with a flame-feeding atmosphere of 100 percent pure oxygen, it was a good bet that the thermometer climbed above 1,400 degrees. At that temperature, copper glows, aluminum melts, and zinc can burst into flame. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee—fragile agglomerations of skin and hair and flesh and bone—wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Jim Lovell had no way of knowing what was happening to the three men at the moment it was happening. He would know soon, but at the moment he didn’t. At the moment, Lovell was concerned with the job in front of him, and that job was to circulate and socialize and shake some hands. There were dozens of dignitaries gathering around to scarf up the White House’s snacks and drinks, and it was Lovell’s business to say hello to as many of them as possible. The guest pass Lovell had been sent in the mail was very specific about this part of the job:

Green and Blue Rooms for individual pic with ambassadors and handshake, it said. It didn’t say You’re invited here for the food; it didn’t say You’re invited here for the fun. It said, in so many words, You’re invited here—if you must know—to work the crowd.

Lovell was not unaccustomed to this kind of evening, of course, and the candor of the invitation was no surprise. This was just more of what he and the other members of the astronaut corps called their time in the barrel: those occasions when some chief of state or chamber of commerce needed a showpiece spaceman to round out a reception and NASA would dispatch a crewman or two to attend the party, pose for pictures with the host, and generally spread goodwill. All of the astronauts were good at this drill, but Lovell was especially good. At 5 feet 11 inches and 170 pounds, with mainstream midwestern looks, he projected an almost archetypal astronaut image, perfect for the VIP who wanted just the right photo to complete his office wall. This evening, there would be fewer opportunities for such photos than most. The invitation called for the event to begin promptly at 5:14 P.M.—it actually said 5:14—and conclude no later than 6:45. What the White House was hoping to achieve with an extra 60 seconds at the front end of the evening was unclear, but all Lovell and the other four crewmen here tonight had to do was work the crowd for the 91 minutes they’d be on call, then they’d be free to go enjoy Washington.

Truth be told, if Lovell had to put in an hour and a half or so in the barrel, there were worse places to do it than the White House. Lyndon Johnson, who was always at his best at nibble-and-gab sessions like these, was here, and Lovell looked forward to saying hello to the president. The two had met once before, just a month or so earlier when Lovell and his copilot Buzz Aldrin were invited down to the ranch for a medal and a speech after their Gemini 12 spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic, ending the triumphantly successful ten-flight run of the tiny craft.

In the deepest part of his deepest heart Lovell had felt that a medal might not actually be warranted. It wasn’t politic to say so, but he had thought so. It wasn’t as if the flight hadn’t been a huge accomplishment; it was. It wasn’t as if it hadn’t achieved all the goals the mission planners had set out for it, and more; it had. But the nine previous flights had achieved most of their goals too, and if it weren’t for the astronautical expertise accumulated on Geminis 3 through 11, Gemini 12 would never have been possible. Johnson, however, had a taste for high drama, and as this final Gemini flight unfolded—as Lovell docked his two-man spacecraft with an unmanned Agena spacecraft as effortlessly as if he were pulling a Pontiac into a parking space; as Buzz climbed outside and rode the back of the Agena like a dickey bird on a rhino’s back—the president became more and more pleased with his multi-billion-dollar space program. No sooner had Lovell and Aldrin plopped back into the ocean than Johnson called out the photographers and proclamation writers and had the heroes down for a ceremony and a little south Texas hospitality.

After that, Lovell had a soft spot for the president and counted himself among Johnson’s most enthusiastic admirers. But even if there were no chief executive here today, this reception would be one worth attending. The purpose of the evening was to celebrate the signing of the much debated, prosaically named Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space. As treaties went, Lovell knew this was not a truly big deal; it wasn’t Versailles, it wasn’t Appomattox, it wasn’t a nuclear test ban. It was one of those treaties that come about because, as the diplomats say, something should be put on paper.

That something had to do with space—specifically, the boundaries that define space. Since the first proto-nation drew the first line in the soil of the first populated savanna, countries had been steadily, greedily extending their boundaries. It began with a circle around the campfire, then it was a zone from the campfire to the coast, then it was from the coast out to a three-mile line in the ocean. In the last ten years, since the dawn of the space age, the three miles had changed to two hundred miles, the direction had changed from out to up, and the world’s nations had been fretting about if and how the lines would continue to be drawn in this most exotic of new frontiers.

The pact being signed today by more than five dozen countries would see to it that there were no lines. Among its provisions were guarantees that outer space would remain forever nonmilitarized, that no country would declare any Earth orbital zone as its own, and that land claims would never be made on the moon, Mars, or any other place humanity’s rockets might one day reach. More important to Lovell and the other astronauts here tonight, however, was article 5 of the document—the safe return of space travelers clause. This provision guaranteed that any astronauts or cosmonauts who veered off course and splashed down in a hostile ocean or thumped down in a hostile wheat field would not be scooped up and carted off by security forces of the violated country. Rather, they would be treated as envoys of mankind, to be safely and promptly returned to the state of registry of their space vehicle.

In picking the astronaut delegation tonight, NASA had chosen carefully. In addition to Lovell, who had flown twice in the Gemini program, was Neil Armstrong, a veteran NASA test pilot, whose sole Gemini flight, Gemini 8, had ended in near disaster ten months earlier when one of his thrusters suddenly went south on him, causing his ship to begin spinning at a stomach-knotting 500 r.p.m. and forcing flight controllers to abort the mission and bring him down in the first ocean or sea or duck pond they could find. Also on hand was Scott Carpenter, whose Mercury flight had gone almost as haywire five years earlier when he spent too much time in his final orbit monkeying around with some onboard astronomy experiment, aligned his retrorockets improperly, and splashed down in the Atlantic 250 miles from his recovery crew. While the Navy scrambled this way and that, the second American to orbit the Earth found himself bobbing in his life raft, nibbling his ration crackers, and scanning the horizon for a ship he fervently hoped would be flying the Stars and Stripes.

Both Armstrong and Carpenter could have used the protection of the treaty during their flights, and this no doubt was on NASA’s mind when it sent them here tonight. The other two members of the delegation, Gordon Cooper and Dick Gordon, were tougher to explain, though it was likely that NASA had simply spun its dial and picked the first two names that came up.

Lovell got a brief hello from Johnson almost as soon as the reception began—just a brief hello, nothing like the presidential fawning of only a month earlier—and wandered to the buffet table to get a sandwich and survey the minefield of milling dignitaries. The room would be a big one to work. Kurt Waldheim was here from Austria; Ambassador Patrick Dean had come from Great Britain; Anatoly Dobrynin strolled over from the Soviet embassy; Dean Rusk, Averell Harriman, and Arthur Goldberg were on hand for the United States. The presence of so many geopolitical giants was catnip for legislators from Capitol Hill as well. Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen, Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, and Senators Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale of Minnesota were here, as well as other Washington heavyweights who had wangled invitations of their own.

Lovell was about to wade into the crowd when he noticed Dobrynin standing to his right. The Soviet ambassador had a solid reputation among the astronauts who had met him before. He was said to be an accomplished student of both the American and Soviet space