Cooper's telling of the Apollo THIRTEEN mission was
originally published in New Yorker Magazine, where he was a
staff writer, and is now an e-book.
For all the science and human achievement which went into
the launch, recovery from near-disaster and return of this
space mission, the reader is immediately struck by the
contrast between equipment and testing standards of 1970
and of this time. We first notice this when observers of
the travelling rocket, at Houston, see a white blip appear
on their monitoring TV screen but dismiss it - the
screen "had been flickering and blipping badly". They had
seen half of the mission's liquid oxygen spilling out into
space and forming a huge bubble which reflected sunlight,
but nobody knew.
The courageous, highly trained Apollo Thirteen astronauts
were totally dependent on their vessel. Captain Lovell
was passing the time during the several-day long journey by
filming life inside the capsule so that NASA could put out
an educational programme. He had circled the moon on Apollo
8 and this time expected to land. Haise was the lunar
module pilot and Swigert, the standby who joined the team
when another astronaut was exposed to German measles, was
the command module pilot.
Cooper describes the technical construction of the oxygen
tanks and other systems which supported life and
propulsion. The detail is necessary to understand how a
temperature gauge that did not register above eighty-five
degrees (I'm guessing Fahrenheit) contributed to the safety
shutoff overheating and failing without anyone knowing. Hot
wires burned off their coverings and the exposed wires
sparked in the oxygen tank, causing what most of us call an
explosion but the NASA engineers like to refer to as
a 'tank failure'. As a vacuum does not transmit sound
waves, the astronauts felt as much as heard the resulting
vibration. They and Command immediately started to
discover what the problem was, though their instrumentation
could not tell them directly so they had to work through
all the possibilities. The ship soon began to drop power
and the astronauts were clearly in danger.
Again, we hear that the astronauts "had to riffle through
twenty pounds of instruction sheets" before they found what
they were looking for in a procedure manual. Today a gadget
the size of a credit card would produce this information
ideally sorted. NASA base was using some of the most
powerful computers in the world.
Henry SF Cooper Jr. has condensed the nerve-wracking days
and immense amount of teamwork into THIRTEEN. The book is
heavy with initials like FIDO, LM, RETRO, GUIDO, TELMU, for
teams and equipment, and combined with the constant
engineering data it can feel like heavy reading at times
for the average person. However at 110 pages it is not too
long and the human story is always paramount. Those who
have watched the Ron Howard film starring Tom Hanks and
wanted to know more can immerse themselves in the
technicalities, while those who want to know how it felt
for these astronauts to overcome panic and keep working,
and what state they were in when they returned, will focus
on the men themselves. THIRTEEN will certainly be
appreciated by engineers and designers, and by readers with
a strong interest in the space programme.
“Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts
aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar
landing in history. But as they soared through space, two
hundred thousand miles from earth, an explosion badly
damaged their spacecraft. With compromised engines and
failing life-support systems, the crew was in incomparably
grave danger. Faced with below-freezing temperatures, a
seriously ill crew member, and a dwindling water supply, a
safe return seemed unlikely.
Thirteen is the shocking, miraculous, and entirely true
story of how the astronauts and ground crew guided Apollo 13
to a safe landing on earth. Expanding on dispatches written
for the New Yorker, Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. brings readers
unparalleled detail on the moment-by-moment developments of
one of NASA’s most dramatic missions.
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