Apollo 13

The disaster was actually rooted in a pre-launch testing error. During a routine ground test before the mission, an oxygen tank was accidentally dropped about two inches, which slightly displaced a fill tube. Later, when technicians tried to drain the tank using an internal heater, a faulty thermostatic switch allowed the temperature to climb to a staggering one thousand degrees Fahrenheit, melting the wire insulation and setting the stage for the later explosion.

The actual explosion occurred after the crew was ignored by the world. Just minutes before the oxygen tank ruptured, the astronauts conducted a live television broadcast to show off their spacecraft. However, because the public had grown bored with moon missions after Apollo 11 and 12, none of the major television networks aired the segment, leaving the crew to perform for an audience that essentially did not exist.

The crew was forced to use their landing craft as a lifeboat. The Lunar Module, named Aquarius, was only designed to support two people for two days on the surface of the moon. To survive the journey home, it had to sustain three men for four days, forcing the crew and ground controllers to radically strip down the ship’s power consumption to the absolute bare minimum.

They solved the square peg in a round hole problem with office supplies. As carbon dioxide levels rose to dangerous levels in the Lunar Module, the crew realized the round scrubbers were used up, but the spare square canisters from the Command Module would not fit. Engineers on Earth spent hours designing an adapter using only what the crew had on hand, including plastic bags, cardboard from flight manuals, suit hoses, and rolls of grey duct tape.

The crew endured temperatures near the freezing point of water. To save every possible watt of electricity for the final re-entry, the astronauts shut down almost all heaters and electronic systems. The cabin temperature dropped to thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, causing condensation to cover every surface and making sleep nearly impossible for the shivering crew.

Extreme dehydration caused the astronauts to lose significant body weight. Because the water supply was strictly rationed and the crew was hesitant to drink for fear of filling their urine collection bags, they became severely dehydrated. By the time they splashed down, the three men had lost a combined total of over thirty-one pounds.

Navigation became a matter of visual geometry. With the guidance computer turned off to save power, Commander Jim Lovell had to manually align the spacecraft for a critical engine burn. He used the Earth’s terminator line, the distinct arc where day meets night on the planet’s surface, as a visual reference point to ensure the ship was pointed in the right direction.

The explosion accidentally gave the crew a world record. Because the mission had to take a wide loop around the far side of the moon to gain the velocity needed to return to Earth, the Apollo 13 crew traveled farther away from our planet than any other human beings in history, reaching a distance of over two hundred and forty-eight thousand miles.

The re-entry blackout lasted significantly longer than expected. Normally, the layer of ionized gas surrounding a spacecraft during atmospheric entry cuts off radio contact for about three minutes. For Apollo 13, the silence stretched to nearly six minutes due to a shallower-than-normal entry angle, leading mission control to briefly fear that the heat shield had failed.

A discarded nuclear battery is still resting on the ocean floor. The Lunar Module carried a SNAP-27 radioisotope thermoelectric generator meant to power scientific instruments on the moon. When the crew jettisoned the craft, the nuclear fuel cask survived the descent and now sits in the Tonga Trench, where it remains safely encased under several miles of water.

The mission was almost canceled before it even started. Just days before launch, backup pilot Charlie Duke accidentally exposed the primary crew to the German measles. Command Module pilot Ken Mattingly had no immunity and was grounded at the last minute, replaced by Jack Swigert, who ended up being the one to actually flip the switch that triggered the explosion.

The Command Module became a giant cold-storage locker. Without power, the moisture from the astronauts’ breath condensed on the cold metal walls and delicate electronics. When it came time to power the ship back up for re-entry, the crew was terrified that the water would cause a massive short circuit, but the insulation held just well enough to keep the systems running.

Ground controllers stayed awake for nearly eighty hours straight. The flight directors and engineering teams in Houston worked in rotating shifts without ever truly leaving the building, fueled by caffeine and the sheer adrenaline of trying to calculate complex orbital trajectories on the fly using slide rules and basic computers.

The crew used a manual sextant to verify their position. Just like ancient mariners on the high seas, the astronauts used a handheld optical sextant to measure the angles of stars. This was particularly difficult because the explosion had surrounded the ship with a cloud of frozen debris that looked exactly like a field of shimmering stars, making it hard to find the real ones.

The final splashdown was one of the most accurate in history. Despite the lack of computer guidance for much of the return trip and the improvised nature of their navigation, the Odyssey capsule landed in the Pacific Ocean within four miles of the recovery ship, the USS Iwo Jima, proving that human intuition and math could still conquer the void of space.