Apollo: The Race to the Moon (64 page)

“Supplying power to the C.S.M.?” he asked TELMU dubiously. “Yes,” said TELMU, “about five amps.”

“Ah … to what?” asked Lunney, meaning: What did they think they were going to hook up with? What subsystems in the C.S.M. would the power be used for? Lunney asked EECOM to get to work on answers. As for himself, Lunney began thinking about shutting down Odyssey altogether and sending the crew to live in the LEM.

Lunney had come on shift with a schedule at the back of his mind. While watching Kranz and listening to the loops, he had heard Liebergot report that they had an hour and fifty-four minutes of oxygen pressure left. That had been less than twenty minutes before Lunney took over the flight director’s console. Thus Lunney should have been able to figure on squeezing at least an hour and a half of power out of O2 Tank 1 and Fuel Cell 2 after he came on shift. But it was a night during which the flight director was destined to get only bad news. Eighteen minutes into his shift, EECOM informed him that he had forty minutes before the pressure in Tank 1 hit 100 p.s.i., functionally zero. The pressure was dropping faster than before.

Lunney tried one last time to save the C.S.M. “Clint, let me ask you, is there anything you want to do trying to pump up the other tank? Or are you satisfied that both of these tanks are going down, and we’re past helping them, even with batteries? That’s what I’m getting at. I’m just trying to be sure that you’ve gone through everything and you don’t have any other tricks up your sleeve.”

“Sure don’t, Flight,” Burton said.

Since the initial report of a problem, as first Kranz and then Lunney had been forced into a steadily shrinking circle of options, the flight control team had kept searching for something that would enable them to avoid the last, drastic step of giving up on the command module and using the LEM’s systems. Now Lunney had exhausted the alternatives, and he turned his full attention to getting Aquarius ready to serve as a lifeboat. By this time the notion of using the LEM to power the C.S.M. had been discarded. The plan was to have the crew live in Aquarius until just before entry, when they would move back into the C.S.M. and power up with the C.S.M.’s three internal batteries that were its source of power for the last phase of the flight.

Lunney was embarking on an exceedingly tricky project that neither he nor any of his team had ever practiced: to close down a command module in such a way that it could be brought back to life some days later, and, at the same time, power up a lunar module without any help from the command module. And this novel, complex procedure, filled with possibilities for irretrievable error, was to be accomplished—or so Lunney now thought—with fewer than forty minutes of power remaining from Fuel Cell 2.

When CapCom Jack Lousma had told the crew a few minutes earlier that the ground was starting to think about using the LEM as a lifeboat, the crew was glad to hear it. “That’s something we’re thinking about too,” Lovell said. They’d already been talking it over, and the first thing the crew proposed to do was run a quick P52 (program number 52) and get the LEM’s platform aligned.

It was an important decision. If the crew was to get home, they had to have an aligned, functioning guidance platform. But an I.M.U. was also an extravagant consumer of electrical power and water (for cooling purposes), both of which were now in precariously short supply. Odyssey and Aquarius each had platforms that were not in any way linked with each other. The Thirteen crew was proposing to power up Aquarius’s I.M.U., run a P52 on Odyssey’s computer to give them the C.S.M.’s alignment data, and then punch those numbers into Aquarius’s system. The question was: Should they do it? The next time that Aquarius would have to have the platform operating could be as long as twenty hours away, when, after they came out from behind the moon, the LEM’s descent engine would establish a trajectory for home. Furthermore, the platform could be aligned from scratch, through star sightings taken by the crew. The Apollo 13 crew had been trained in that procedure, and the Apollo 12 crew had demonstrated that it could be done in a real emergency. Therefore, one option was to leave the platform powered down until a few hours before it had to be used.

Lunney and Control and Guido discussed it over the loops and agreed that they ought to power down Odyssey’s I.M.U. and align Aquarius’s I.M.U. later, using the Alignment Optical Telescope. Lunney told Odyssey to hold off on the P52. Tom Stafford, who had commanded Apollo 10 a year earlier, was in the MOCR listening to this exchange. As soon as it was over he approached Lunney for a private conversation. They were on the wrong track, Stafford said. Maneuvering the docked spacecraft with the LEM’s thrusters to get manual star sightings was going to be next to impossible. It was essential they get an alignment now, from the C.S.M., while it still had power. Stafford’s was the knowledge of a man who had flown the LEM, and Lunney respected it.

Clint Burton had more bad news.

“Flight, EECOM. Flight, EECOM.”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay, got an update on the time,” said Burton. “It looks like we got about eighteen minutes until we get down to 100 p.s.i., and that’s the cutoff point.”

It had been four minutes since EECOM had told Flight that they had forty minutes left. What had been a scramble now became a breakneck sprint.

After listening to Stafford, Lunney went back to his controllers and asked that they look at the trade-off—could they stand the power drain if they turned on the LEM’s platform now? They would work on it, they replied: “Stand by one, Flight.” “All right,” Lunney muttered. Then, emphatically: “Pronto.”

The exchanges over Flight’s loop were now continuous bursts of queries and instructions to the flight controllers around the room, marked every few minutes by another update on the time remaining before the command module went dead. Like a variety-show juggler with a dozen plates spinning on the top of sticks, Lunney went from one decision to another, keeping the plates spinning, sometimes getting back to the one at the other end of the row only when it seemed to be wobbling on its last revolution. Throughout it all, Lunney, aged thirty-three, maintained the mildly distracted air of an experienced parent getting many small children ready for school.

At one of the most hectic points, Lunney even took a few seconds to make a small ironic joke that no one else got. TELMU had forgotten about using the LEM to power the C.S.M. and now, ten minutes later, was focusing exclusively on powering up the LEM’s own systems. Lunney asked TELMU whether they needed to send any power at all from the LEM to the C.S.M., if just to keep the I.M.U. heated. “I’m not sure we can do that,” TELMU told Flight, as if surprised Flight could even consider such a thing. “Can’t do that,” Lunney acknowledged, amusement in his voice. “That was a long time ago.”

It seemed to the astronauts that the ground was taking an awfully long time to recognize what was obvious to them, that they had to get into the LEM immediately. But they couldn’t simply climb in and shut the door. Powering up the LEM was much more complicated than throwing a power switch, and activating the LEM’s many systems was much more complicated than flicking a few switches to On. Fred Haise had three onboard checklists for powering up Aquarius and activating its systems under various circumstances, none of which applied to the circumstances he faced now. Furthermore, the shortest of the established checklists would take two hours to complete. TELMU’s team had been busy cobbling together a way of powering up Aquarius without any cooperation from Odyssey and devising a drastically shortened checklist for doing it. Finally CapCom Lousma was able to tell the crew that he had a procedure for powering up.

“Okay,” said Swigert. “That sounds like good news.” He did not need to add “It’s just in time.” Everyone knew that already.

Lunney was having trouble getting things to happen. He had been persuaded that the crew had to run a P52 in the command module to get a course alignment for the LEM’s platform, and Guido and Control now agreed. But Guido was struggling simultaneously with a completely separate issue that had come to preoccupy him. His back room was posing the hair-raising possibility that if they turned off the command module’s guidance system and let it sit in the cold—surely subfreezing; how much colder than that no one could predict exactly—it wouldn’t work when the time came for entry. The guidance people, along with teams in the MER and at M.I.T. in Cambridge, were trying to calculate whether that fear was warranted, and, if so, whether they could afford to run the I.M.U.’s heaters for the duration of the flight.

Three times Lunney had tried to focus Guido’s attention on the status of the alignment presently residing in Odyssey’s computer. Now Guido came onto the loop, saying that the crew ought to do a P52.

“That’s what I’m asking you!” said Lunney exasperatedly. “Do you have [a good alignment] now? We don’t have much time. Do you have a good one now? As far as you know?”

“A good alignment?” Guido asked, still absorbed in deciding whether they should keep the I.M.U. in the command module heated.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m asking you,” said Lunney. “You have a good alignment? I’m not worried about tenths of a degree either.”

“Well, it oughta be that good, Flight,” said Guido, aggrieved—ordinarily, it should be good within hundredths of a degree.

“Okay, yeah,” said Lunney wearily. Just then EECOM came back to him.

“We need to open up the surge tank,” Burton said. “That manifold pressure is dropping.” No longer was Burton’s back room worried about having enough oxygen for power, but about whether the crew would have enough oxygen in the command module to breathe.

Lunney grunted softly, as if someone had just hit him in the stomach—which is how he described that moment years later. It was like a blow, and then like a hole into which his stomach and the rest of him were starting to slide. It was the one time during the entire night, he recalled, when for a moment he backed away from the rush of events and “had a sense of ‘Holy Christ, it’s this bad. It has really happened this way.’” The surge tank was the last reserve of oxygen. It had to be protected for the entry, and now Burton wanted him to use part of it, lest the crew asphyxiate.

“Okay,” Lunney replied after a pause. “Wouldn’t you rather pump that up in the LEM?” He didn’t want to tap the C.S.M.’s surge tank. “Well,” said Burton, “we got to get into the LEM first, Flight.”

“CapCom, get ’em going in the LEM,” Lunney said quickly. “We gotta get oxygen on in the LEM.”

Lousma passed the word on to the crew and turned to Lunney. Years later Lousma himself would not remember, but Lunney felt that the CapCom—“Bless his stout Marine heart”—had recognized his sinking feeling. Off the loop, Lousma reminded Lunney to see how far TELMU had gotten in preparing his abbreviated activation checklist. Maybe they could use that rather than ad-hoc the steps. “That one comment at that one point got me right back out of the hole and on track,” Lunney recalled. “After that you’re busy, it’s just blowin’-and-goin’ time, and you don’t have time to worry.”

The power from the remaining fuel cell in Odyssey was now good only minute to minute. Since the LEM still wasn’t prepared to take over, it was agreed between the ground and Swigert that he should switch to one of the C.S.M.’s internal batteries just before the fuel cell failed. While they didn’t want to do this a moment sooner than necessary, they couldn’t afford to delay it a moment too long, lest they lose all power temporarily—and, with it, control of the spacecraft and the course alignment stored in the I.M.U.

The twenty minutes that followed were perhaps the most rushed, the most confused, and in retrospect the most glorious of the four-day crisis. The Black Team was racing to complete in minutes a procedure that usually took hours, under the threat of imminent disaster if they failed and under the more subtle threat of a delayed disaster if they got the LEM started but did not shut down the C.S.M. properly.

In the controllers’ memories, the years have tended to smooth over the rough spots. Many of the controllers recall it as having been a piece of cake. Lunney himself conceded that “it was an exciting time,” something of a blur in his memory, but orderly. “I look back on it and reflect upon the kind of teamwork and lack of panic,” he said. “There was no sense of ‘My God, the sky is falling.’ Probably each individual had the same few seconds I did, but there was no sense of it in the Control Center. Listen to [the tapes] and it all sounds tickety-boo, like the guys had been training for it all their lives.” In reality, the tapes reveal that Lunney’s memory was two-thirds right. Teamwork, yes. Lack of panic, yes. Tickety-boo, no.

The MOCR was jammed with people by this time. It wasn’t like the big moments in other flights, when the off-shift controllers would come in and watch quietly. Now, each console was surrounded by a knot of men trying to put together new procedures, amend old ones, and interpret the data, talking to back rooms that were also crowded with reinforcements. It was so noisy that Lunney had to take time out to ask for quiet. The attention of the people talking on the loops was unusually fragmented, and the result was occasionally missed signals, confusion, and contradiction.

EECOM’s back room had been wrong about needing the surge tank; Burton came on a minute after he had asked for it to tell Flight to “disregard the surge tank request.” Lunney had time only to acknowledge, “All right,” because he was struggling to get the LEM activated.

A few minutes later, Burton was back with a request to “get the crew to stuff the power down.”

“Okay,” said Lunney cautiously, “but we wanted to keep [Odyssey’s I.M.U.] up for a little while, I thought you just said, with Bat A, to get a course align in the LEM.”

Burton realized his mistake—when he said, “stuff the power down,” he hadn’t meant to include the I.M.U. “Well,” he said apologetically, “maybe there’s a bit of confusion here.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to turn I.M.U. off until we get a course align in the LEM, right?”

“That’s affirm, Flight.”

The guidance experts remained absorbed in trying to analyze whether they could turn off the heaters in the I.M.U. Lunney, worried about the power drain, checked in with G.N.C.