Apollo 13: ‘Houston, We’ve Had a Problem’

again please [Music] it was plagued by uh bad omens and bad luck from the very beginning looks good here flight good agreement years before the flight when the spacecraft was being built a damaged liquid oxygen tank was installed in the spacecraft the tank had been dropped on the factory floor a little piece of plumbing and prevented the normal procedure for removing oxygen after a routine test prior to the flight and then on the day before flight we filled up the tank again with liquid oxygen and it was a bomb waiting to go off and get back for a pleasant actually it was the end of the work day we were fixing to go to bed after we did a few things to clean up and the next morning going to luna orbit and get ready to land and then it was a large bang when the explosion first occurred we didn't know what happened and that just rang through the metallic structure i was in the lunar module and then i went down to the command module we may have had an instrumentation problem flight raj and we had a pretty large bank associated with the crushing and warning there we started the look at the instrument panels one of the quantity cages of one of the tanks was zero that was the tank that had blew i then looked out the window and saw escaping at a high rate of speed a gaseous oxygen because the explosion occurred on the first the damage tank but that also ruptured the second tank just blew the entire side of the spacecraft off my immediate feeling was just a sick feeling of pit of my stomach or disappointment i knew we had lost the landing and from then on it was not a third letting on the moon but a survival of how to get home okay i want you to double check my arithmetic to make sure we've got a good towards the line go fly how's the arithmetic standby we're checking at the time as scary as the devil and we were handling something that we knew was out of control and every team that came on was dealing with a major set of problems to deal with they just uh jumped to the task and they knew what they had to do okay now let's everybody keep cool we got limbs still attached the lemon spacecraft's good so if we need uh to get back home we got a limb to do a good portion of it with one of the biggest things we had to do in the dying moments of the electrical system and the command module was to transfer the guidance system and transfer the angle numbers from the command module to the lunar module and we only had about 15 minutes to do that about 20 minutes after the explosion it was obvious that we weren't coming to a landing in the moon we were going to go around it glenn had already been down in the trench with trajectory guys and came up with five trajectory return to earth options so we would not we would have missed the earth had we done nothing so the first thing was to get us in the right direction to go around the moon and that was the first maneuver we made we used the landing engine the engine we normally would land it on the moon everybody seemed to be moving in the right directions without being directed everybody had a sense of what had to be done the training guys brought the simulators up over there and the crews were over in the simulators tracking virtually everything they were doing there every configuration change that was proposed to be done was already being worked over in the simulators there so you start getting answers from all these various directions [Music] the command module was very wet there was water everywhere on every in the limb there's no inner walls so you can see water on all the connectors wire bundles plumbing every turn of global water and command module we actually had to get towels out to wipe off the instrument panel to see the instruments we copied that report uh from jim lovell of service module separation at 138 hours and there's one whole side of that this one is that right okay copy that farewell aquarius thank you so it was a question of getting this entire world geared and oriented to one single job get the crew home teamwork was necessary good leadership initiative to think out outside of the box when things go wrong how do we repair them those are the three things that were absolutely necessary i was most proud of being in this team that knew what they had to do and there was no doubt about it the team completely faced up to what had to be done in this case it was a survival challenge that we were faced with so there you are we pulled that off [Music]

Channel: NASA

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Id: MdvoA-sjs0A

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020