become one of survival.
The reports continued, but nothing made sense. Each controller stared incredulously at his display and reported new pieces to add to the puzzle. It took extra seconds sorting out what was real and credible. It appeared we were losing our oxygen and with it the fuel cells, the major source of power. When that happened we would lose control of the main propulsion system. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened in simulation.
As we watched the command module’s life-sustaining resources disappearing, like blood draining from a body, the voices of the crew were unbelievably calm and restrained. It was as if they were reporting something that was no big deal. From all sides of the cockpit, Haise, Swigert, and Lovell were continuing the dialogue, giving us the cockpit meter readings and warning light indications.
I had heard about the fog of battle, but I had never experienced it until now. The early minutes were confusing; all reports and data were suspect. Small firefights occurred as individual problems were corrected, but we had no sense of the big picture. With both electrical buses in an undervoltage condition, the crew was working independently of the control team to restore power to the craft. We were seconds behind them, slowly responding.
I remembered the call from INCO (instrumentation and communications), Gary Scott’s call, that the antenna had switched beam width at the exact time of the power problem. I became convinced that we had an electrical short caused by another antenna glitch. Again I took the wrong fork in the road, believing we would be back on track shortly.
Five minutes after the event, the significance of the crew’s words, “We had a pretty large bang…” hit me. GNC Buck Willoughby, unflappable, started speaking to me slowly, evenly, and without a hint of emotion, “Flight, have the crew verify that the Quad D helium valves are open. I suspect that the big bang shocked the valves shut, cutting off fuel to the attitude thrusters.” Buck’s call started me down a different path. On Apollo 9, I was flight director when the pyrotechnic shock occasioned while separating the CSM from the Saturn S-IVB booster closed the fuel valves. That gave us a few bad moments then. The bang heard by the 13 crew must have been awfully solid to do the same, closing the propellant valves. From this moment on, I proceeded more deliberately and methodically. We were five minutes into the crisis.
CapCom Jack Lousma, frustrated, came up on the loop. “Flight, is there any kind of lead we can give them? Is it instrumentation or have we got real problems or what?” Lousma echoed everyone’s feelings. We were making no progress, virtually every controller still had problems, but no one could see a pattern in all this. It was like living a bad dream, with every event taking place in slow motion. The frustration of the crew and controllers was starting to creep into their voices. Everything we knew about our spacecraft, all that we had learned about the design, precluded the kind of massive failures we were seeing. The data told us we were looking at multiple simultaneous failures. Two, possibly three fuel cells were down, both oxygen tanks depleted, and we had an undetermined attitude control problem that was pushing the two spacecraft around. Soon we would lose power. When that happened, we would lose everything.
The teamwork in the MCC under a crisis is spectacular. While Liebergot, Lousma, and I worked the electrical options with the crew, the remaining controllers were making their inputs to the CapCom, correcting their smaller problems. While sensing the urgency of the electrical problems, they tended their own business, protecting their systems and giving crisp, brief reports so as not to disturb or aggravate the resolution of the main problem— whatever it was.
INCO Gary Scott watched the antenna signal strengths like a hawk. He knew that the crew did not have time to point and select antennas. Gary recommended a fallback to the less powerful but adequate Omni antennas. There are four Omni antennas on the spacecraft. Through the critical first hour, until help arrived, he called out each antenna switch, protecting this vital link as the docked CSM and LM drifted out of control and were pushed around by some force we couldn’t identify. If he had missed once, we would have lost communications, diverting the attention of crew and control team from critical tasks. Scott, like many others, made hero category by his patient, timely, undistracted management of the data stream while everything else was falling down about my team.
It was now ten minutes into the crisis; all the bosses had gone home after the crew’s TV show. I needed to notify top management that we had a hell of a problem on our hands and that we didn’t fully understand what it was. Turning to Lunney, I asked him to call Kraft. Glynn handed me the phone as Chris’s wife, Betty Ann, answered. In response to my request she explained that he was in the shower. I said, “Betty Ann, get him out, I need to talk to him.” When a still-dripping Kraft got on the phone, I told him that we had a major electrical problem and that I believed we had lost one or more fuel cells. I concluded on a somewhat desperate note: “Chris, you better get out here quick; I think we’ve had it!”
GNC and GUIDO, Willoughby and Will Fenner, had been quietly watching the crew struggle to control the spacecraft attitude and avoid “gimbal lock.” This grave problem would come about if the rings that support the whirling wheels of the gyroscope all aligned in the same position. We would then no longer have a usable reading from the gyroscopic platform. In gimbal lock we would be unable to maneuver or point the spacecraft. We would be literally adrift in space until the crew took a fix on certain stars to realign the gyros, much in the way a nineteenth- century sailing ship figured out its position. Every time the crew got close to the danger point, Willoughby, in a hushed but forceful voice, would call, “Flight, they are getting close to gimbal lock.” Lousma would advise the crew, who then used the CSM hand controller and attitude jets to maneuver away from disaster.
The team was now functioning well; we were fourteen minutes into the crisis, fighting a delaying action until we figured out what was going on and what to do about it. Most of the problems seemed to rest on Liebergot’s shoulders. He was responsible for the systems needed to sustain life, power, water, oxygen, and pressure. But no matter what we tried, we were unable to stanch the hemorrhage of the fuel cell oxygen reactants.
Then, abruptly, all the pieces of the puzzle came together. Lovell reported, “It looks to me, looking out the window, that we are venting something.” Then with emphasis he said, “We are venting something out into the— into space—it looks like a gas!” A shock rippled through the room as we recognized that an explosion somewhere in the service module had taken out our cryogenics and fuel cells. The controllers felt they were toppling into an abyss. Needless to say, the lunar mission was now a NoGo. The only thought on my mind was survival, how to buy the seconds and minutes to give the crew a chance to return to Earth.
Now I was damn angry that I had wasted fifteen precious minutes by not assembling the pieces earlier. I should have seen it. Somewhere, somehow, an oxygen tank exploded and it caused a lot of collateral damage. The feeling of self-reproach passed quickly; I became icy cold, my mind reaching out for options as my training kicked in.
Our objective from here on was survival. The crew’s only hope was Mission Control. My team had to start the turnaround. With two flight controller teams in the room, the level of chatter was distracting. My team needed to get back on the voice comm and get focused. I finally took charge. Standing up I yelled across the top of the consoles, “Okay, all flight controllers, cut the chatter. I want every member of the White Team to settle down and get back on the voice loops—the rest of you shut up!
“Now, let’s everybody keep cool. The LM is still attached, the spacecraft is good. So if we need to get back home, we have the LM to do a good portion of it with.
“Let’s make sure that we don’t blow the [remaining] command module electrical power with the batteries, or do anything that would cause us to lose fuel cell 2. We have to keep the oxygen working and would like to save the attitude control propellants. We are in good shape to get home.
“Let’s solve the problem, team… let’s not make it any worse by guessing.”
The team focused on keeping the crew alive and finding a way to get them home. Our determination was evident as we calculated the limited resources available in the damaged spacecraft. For the moment the power and the oxygen in the CSM could keep the crew alive but the LM was ultimately the only safe haven, even though it had been designed to accommodate only two men for two days.
I knew I had to move quickly to stabilize the situation and then hand over the remnants of the mission to Lunney’s team. I wanted time to review all the data. I had the absolutely chilling fear that I had missed something important. I hoped that some fresh minds might pick up on it. I wanted to get the White Team off-line, get them together in a quiet corner, nail down the cause, and then start on a plan to rescue the crew. We were the lead team. It was our responsibility to take over management of the crisis.
My console was a mess, littered with schematics, procedures, the console log, and cigarette butts. Lunney’s team was scurrying around the room preparing for handover. Clint Burton, Liebergot’s replacement, nervously
