Apollo: The Race to the Moon (62 page)

Around the corner from the MOCR, in SPAN, Scott Simpkinson watched the data with growing concern. Like everyone else, he had been hoping that it was an instrumentation problem. Now someone told him that the pressure in the second O2 tank was dropping. “At that point,” he said later, “we began to get everybody in the world working on it.”

18 minutes. Kranz had just finished warning the crew through CapCom to maneuver out of a new threat of gimbal lock when EECOM got back to Flight with his recommendation. “Flight.” Liebergot cleared his throat nervously. “I think the best thing we can do right now is start a power-down.”

Kranz tried to make the best of it. “You want to power-down, let us look at the T.M. [telemetry] and all that good stuff, and then come back up [power up again].”

“That’s right.” Liebergot played along. They could still hope that this was something to be explained and fixed.

Chris Kraft, recently promoted to deputy director of M.S.C., was in the shower when he got a call from George Abbey. Kraft dressed without taking time to dry himself and drove to M.S.C. at speeds up to 90 m.p.h. He walked into the MOCR and over to Kranz’s console. Kranz glanced up at the man he called Teacher. “We are in deep shit,” he said.

32 minutes. CapCom Jack Lousma, feeling a little apologetic that the MOCR didn’t seem to be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat tonight, called up to the crew. “Thirteen,” he said, “we’ve got lots and lots of people working on this. We’ll get you some dope as soon as we have it, and you’ll be the first to know.” There was a pause of several seconds, and then back from Odyssey came Jim Lovell’s voice, as dry as the 200,000 miles of vacuum it had crossed:

“Oh. Thank you.”

It was classy, it was cool, and it reminded his listeners: This episode might be a strain on you folks in the MOCR, and that’s too bad, but three of us up here have a unique interest in how it all comes out.

As for Kranz, a strange change in his style was taking place. During the first few minutes after the problem was reported, he had been brusque, even querulous, as people were slow to explain to him what was going on. His little speech to the controllers had been intended to reassure, but his delivery had had a hard edge to it. Now, as the crisis deepened, his tone was getting more and more casual, sometimes almost gentle, as he went from one controller’s problems to another’s.

John Aaron arrived at the Control Center. He walked slowly through the MOCR and the back rooms, stopping periodically to plug in at the consoles. “You can visualize what had happened,” he reminisced. “Everyone was glued to his own tube and he was digging into his own area deeper and deeper and deeper.” Their disbelief in what was happening, Aaron thought, was induced to some degree by their training. The SimSups’ favorite trick was to confuse the controllers with instrumentation problems and then “while you were off chasing the flaky readouts they would drop the hammer on you with some real big failure and see how well you could back out of that.” The simulations always had a way out; surely this situation must have a way out as well. To Aaron, it was as if the controllers were saying, “We’re not going to give up, we’re not going to give up, we can’t give up, we’ve never had this happen before.” He began preaching to them in his Oklahoma twang. “You guys are wasting your time,” he said to them. “You’re convincing yourself this is some kind of funny instrumentation problem. You really need to understand that the C.S.M. is dying.”

38 minutes. Liebergot watched the pressure in his remaining O2 tank slowly fall. George Bliss called from the back room to tell him that now the pressure in the surge tank was falling as well—the C.S.M.’s systems had automatically tapped into it to try to make up for the deficits elsewhere. This was not permissible. The surge tank was a small bottle of gaseous oxygen on board the command module that was normally used for entry. Ordinarily, it could be refilled any time by one of the O2 tanks. But if they were gone, the surge tank had to be preserved at all costs. Liebergot called Kranz, asking him to instruct the crew to isolate the surge tank.

Kranz was still focused on trying to save as much of the mission as he could, which at this point meant trying to restore pressure in O2 Tank 1 and keep at least one fuel cell working. “Why that?” he said sharply. “I don’t understand that, Sy.” If he wanted to keep the fuel cell going, why pull off one source of oxygen?

“We want to save the surge tank which we will need for entry,” said Liebergot. There was a brief pause.

“Okay. I’m with you. I’m with you.” Kranz’s voice was resigned. “CapCom, let’s also isolate the surge tank.”

The term for what Kranz had been doing since he had heard about the anomaly was “downmoding,” moving from one set of options to another, more restricted set. As he did so, he was trying to disturb the standard configurations as little as possible—Kranz, like Kraft, had formulated some precepts of flight control, and one of his favorites was “Tread lightly, lest ye step in shit.” He had been trying, he recalled, to “move very easily and progressively through this thing—because you did not want to close out any of your options for any of the systems, because you never knew which ones you were going to get.” At this point, the options were dwindling to a precarious handful.

42 minutes. In an attempt to keep O2 Tank 1 alive, Liebergot instructed Odyssey to use manual heaters to increase the pressure. The heaters started, and Liebergot watched the pressure reading. It should have been going up as the heat was applied. It wasn’t. He called Dick Brown, who was watching the same screen in the back room.

“E.P.S., EECOM. It looks grim.”

“Yes it does,” Brown replied.

“We got the five amps [of power, to heat the heaters], and no pressure increase.”

“Just went down.”

Liebergot sighed. “It’s going down,” he told Brown. “We’re losing it.” Liebergot called Flight and asked that the crew turn on the fans in O2 Tank l. That didn’t help either. The pressure continued to fall.

46 minutes.

“Flight, EECOM.”

“Go ahead.”

“The pressure in O2 Tank 1 is all the way down to 297. You’d better think about getting in the LEM and using the LEM systems. I’m going to have to power way down. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to save the O2 for the [remaining] fuel cell.” Liebergot, like Aaron, now knew that the command module was dying. If that was true, the only way the crew could get back was by getting into the LEM and surviving on its oxygen, water, and power.

Kranz pushed a little—the heaters weren’t working, perhaps; maybe there were some circuit breakers to be checked, some way to get those heaters going and bring up the O2 pressure, some way to supply oxygen to the fuel cell.

“We saw the current,” Liebergot said bleakly, but Kranz persisted, so Liebergot gave him some circuit breakers to check on panel 226.

Kranz was determined to try every possibility, but he was not oblivious to what Liebergot was telling him. A minute later, Kranz called TELMU with a brief message: “I want you to get some guys figuring out minimum power in the LEM to sustain life.”

In the middle of the warm Houston night, the cars began pulling into the empty parking lots outside Buildings 45 and 30. They wheeled across the lots heedless of signs and painted arrows. Occasionally rubber squealed as someone braked abruptly into a space. When they got out, the drivers half-ran, calling to each other with hurried exchanges of whatever fragmentary information they had.

Ed Fendell, now an INCO, was one of them. He had been chatting with Gerry Griffin over a beer after their softball game when he got a call from the INCO on duty. By the time he arrived, the lots were already filling up. To hell with that, Fendell thought—there was an open spot right next to Building 30. In his rush, he locked his keys in the car, which sat there for the next five days, in the space clearly marked as reserved for the director of Flight Operations.

51 minutes. “Sy,” George Bliss told Liebergot from the back room, “it looks like from the leak rate that we’ve got one hour and fifty-four minutes left until we’re down to 100 p.s.i. in Tank 1. Which is about the end of it for the fuel cells.”

As often happened, Flight was asking a question while a controller was talking to the back room. In this instance, Kranz was saying, “I see that juice is still going down there, EECOM. You got any more suggestions?” Liebergot hadn’t heard. He called Flight to pass along Bliss’s bad news.

“Flight, EECOM.”

Kranz repeated his question: “Any more suggestions in trying to pump up O2 Tank 1 pressure?”

Throughout the crisis, Liebergot had been reasonably successful in suppressing his emotions, keeping his voice businesslike. For one moment, in one word, his unhappiness showed. “No,” Liebergot said miserably, a brief wail. Then his voice was back to normal: “Flight, we’re going to hit 100 p.s.i. in an hour and fifty-four minutes. That’s the end, right there.”

In less than two hours, the command module would be lifeless. Kranz acknowledged.

54 minutes. In SPAN, Scott Simpkinson was puzzling over the loss of oxygen. One last possibility occurred to him—it involved a radical cure, but this was a radical problem. He got himself patched through to talk with Liebergot.

“Hey, did we close the reactant valves on those two fuel cells that’s down?” Simpkinson asked. “We could be losing cryo through there.”

There was one reactant valve leading into each fuel cell. Simpkinson was pointing out a source of leakage that Liebergot hadn’t considered. But the solution—closing the reactant valve—was final. Once its reactant valve had been closed, a fuel cell could not be reactivated. Still, it was a new idea. Liebergot broached it to Brown, who was dubious. “I’m not sure this problem’s not back up in the tank somewhere,” he said. “And if we can get that O2 straightened out it might straighten out the—”

Liebergot interrupted. “I don’t think we’re going to get it straightened out, Dick.”

“I … I don’t either,” Brown finally answered. There was a long silence. And then, for the first time since they had been thrown into the middle of this mystery, they began to see how it might have happened.

“There’s a possibility that there could be a leak between that reactant valve and the rate sensor,” Brown conceded. “If there is, then shutting it off may help us. But that’d be a dual failure, not a single failure.” And a dual failure still seemed as improbable to both of them as it ever had.

EECOM pondered that for a moment. Finally Liebergot said, “It’d have to be in the cryo tanks for them both [both fuel cells] to go.”

“Somewhere back there,” Brown agreed.

But, still, that left the problem of explaining why both O2 tanks were failing. Then the nickel dropped. “Yeah, that’s right, it’s common,” Liebergot said excitedly. “Dick, if you blasted a hole downstream between the rate transducer and the reactant valve, that’d be, that, that—Liebergot could barely get the words out, it suddenly seemed so obvious—“that’s manifold right there, all three cells.” He was very close to the truth.

At that same moment, Kranz was on the loop with FIDO. The spacecraft was rapidly nearing the outer limits of the time at which it could perform a direct abort, returning to earth without first looping around the moon. But a direct abort meant using the S.P.S. engine on a very sick service module. Kranz told FIDO to concentrate exclusively on returns around the moon, using the LEM’s engines. “Unless we get a heck of a lot smarter, I think we are wasting our time planning on using the S.P.S.”

Arabian had arrived at the MER about half an hour after the problem had first been reported. It was at times like this, one observer reflected, that Mad Don was at his best. Arabian’s extravagances were muted but his quickness and insightfulness remained. Also, he didn’t have any trouble making up his mind under pressure—“He is very decisive,” the observer said, “and when you’re under a lot of stress that’s very helpful.” Arabian began by pulling the power people and thermal people up to the blackboard, where they mapped out the minimum voltages under which different pieces of Odyssey’s equipment could operate. After half an hour, they had worked up a basic configuration. Arabian didn’t wait for it to get written down; he and a few of his team trotted over to Building 30 to talk to the F.O.D. people themselves.

69 minutes. The crew had closed the reactant valve on Fuel Cell 3, and it hadn’t helped—nor had Liebergot and Brown really expected it to. They were now increasingly convinced that something drastic had happened to the manifold leading into all three cells. The time was 10:17. Kranz had just informed all the controllers that they should begin to hand over to Glynn Lunney’s Black Team. Liebergot stood up shakily from the console to turn it over to Clint Burton. It had been a long time since he had last told himself to swallow, and he found he could barely talk. “I was so relieved to be relieved,” he would say many years later, when he was finally able to smile about it.

The White Team filed downstairs to Room 210 on the second floor of the Control Center, the Data Room, where they could stretch out the analogue strip charts on tables. Room 210 was to be the command post for the rest of the mission, and Kranz’s first command decision was that the White Team would not take another regular shift in the MOCR. Milt Windler’s Maroon Team, Gerry Griffin’s Gold, and Glynn Lunney’s Black would stand the regular shifts while the White Team devoted itself to planning the burn to bring the crew home and then the events leading to entry, both of which would require procedures that were without precedent.

Liebergot and the other systems people began to examine the d-log, the data log, a second-by-second dump of all the telemetry that had been received just prior to, during, and just after the anomaly. And it was then that Sy Liebergot began to understand the basics, though it would be many more weeks before anyone would fully understand the night’s events. In fact, unearthing the truth took an investigative board similar to the one established after the 204 fire. Scott Simpkinson oversaw M.S.C.‘s part of the investigation. Don Arabian headed the team of engineers who, in a tour de force of engineering detective work, tracked down the convoluted history of O2 Tank 2. As the finishing touch, Arabian took an identical O2 tank, subjected it to exactly the sequence of events that he believed to have caused the Apollo 13 anomaly, and produced exactly the same result. This is what had happened: