Hey you guys, notice anything about that other tank? Lovell nudged Swigert, pointed to the tank one meter, then pointed to his microphone. Swigert nodded.
“Jack,” the command module pilot asked quietly, “are you copying O2 tank one cryo pressure?”
There was a pause. Maybe Lousma looked at Liebergot’s monitor, maybe Liebergot told him off the loop. Maybe he even knew already. “That’s affirmative,” the Capcom said.
As near as Lovell could tell, it would be a while before the ship’s endgame would play out. He had no way of calculating the leak rate in the tank, but if the moving needle was any indication, he had a couple of hours at least before the 320 pounds of oxygen were gone. When the tank gasped its last, the only air and electricity left on board would come from a trio of compact batteries and a single, small oxygen tank. These were intended to be used at the very end of the flight, when the command module would be separated from the service module and would still need a few bursts of power and a few puffs of air to see it through reentry. The little tank and the batteries could run for just a couple of hours. Combining this with what was left in the hissing oxygen tank, Odyssey alone could keep the crew alive until sometime between midnight and 3 a.m. Houston time. It was now a little after 10 p.m.
But Odyssey wasn’t alone. Attached to its nose was the hale and hearty, fat and fueled Aquarius, an Aquarius with no leaks, no gas clouds. An Aquarius that could hold and sustain two men comfortably, and in a pinch, three men with some jostling. No matter what happened to Odyssey, Aquarius could protect the crew. For a little while, anyway. From this point in space, Lovell knew, a return to Earth would take about one hundred hours. The LEM had enough air and power only for the forty-five or so hours it would have taken to descend to the surface of the moon, stay there for a day and a half, and fly back up for a rendezvous with Odyssey. And that air and power would last forty-five hours only if there were two men aboard; put another passenger inside and you cut that time down considerably. Water on the lander was similarly limited.
But Lovell realized that for the moment Aquarius might offer the only option. He looked across the cabin at Fred Haise, his lunar module pilot. Of the three of them, it was Haise who knew the LEM best, who had trained in it the longest, who would be able to coax the most out of its limited resources.
“If we’re going to get home,” Lovell said to his crewman, “we’re going to have to use Aquarius.”
Back on the ground, Liebergot had discovered the falling pressure in tank one at about the same time Lovell did. Unlike the commander of the mission, the EECOM, sitting at the safe remove of a control room in Houston, was not yet prepared to give up on his spacecraft, but he did not hold out great hopes for it either. Liebergot turned to his right, where Bob Heselmeyer, the environmental control officer for the LEM, sat. At this moment, the EECOM and his lunar module counterpart could not have been in more different worlds. They were both working the same mission, both struggling with the same crisis, yet Liebergot was looking out from the abyss of a console full of blinking lights and sickly data, while Heselmeyer was monitoring a slumbering Aquarius beaming home not a single worrisome reading.
Liebergot glanced almost enviously at Heselmeyer’s perfect little screen with all its perfect little numbers and then looked grimly back at his own console. On either side of the monitor were handles that maintenance technicians used to pull the screen out for repairs and adjustments. Liebergot all at once discovered that for several minutes he had been clutching the handles in a near death grip. He released the handles and shook his arms to restore their circulation but not before noticing that the backs of both his hands had turned a cold, bloodless white.
“Did I hear you right?” Haise, the electrical specialist asked Lousma. “You want me to shut the reac valve on fuel cell three?”
“That’s affirmative,” Lousma answered.
“You want me to go through the whole smash for fuel cell shut-down?”
“That’s affirmative.”
Haise turned to Lovell and nodded sadly. “It’s official,” said the astronaut who until just an hour ago was to have the sixth man on the moon.
“It’s over,” said Lovell, who was to have been the fifth.
“I’m sorry,” said Swigert, who would have overseen the mother ship in lunar orbit while his colleagues walked. “We did everything we could.”
At the EECOM console and in the backroom, Liebergot, Bliss, Sheaks and Brown watched their monitors as the valve in fuel cell three was slammed shut. The numbers for oxygen tank one confirmed their worst fears: the O2 leak continued. Liebergot asked Kranz to order that fuel cell one be shut next. Kranz complied – and the oxygen leak continued.
Liebergot looked away from his screen: the end, he knew, was at last here. Had the explosion or meteor collision or whatever else crippled the ship occurred seven hours earlier or one hour later, it would have been another EECOM on console at the time, another EECOM who would have attended this death watch. But the accident happened 55 hours, 54 minutes, and 53 seconds into the mission, during the last hour of a shift that by sheer scheduling happenstance belonged to Seymour Liebergot. Now Liebergot, through no fault of his own, was about to become the first flight controller in the history of the manned space program to lose the ship that had been placed in his charge, a calamity any controller worked his whole career to avoid. The EECOM turned to his right, toward where Bob Heselmeyer, the LEM’s environmental officer, sat. As Liebergot glanced again at Heselmeyer’s screen, he could not help thinking of that simulation, that terrible simulation which had nearly cost him his job a few weeks earlier.
“Remember,” said Liebergot, “when we were working on those lifeboat procedures?”
Heselmeyer gave him a blank look.
“The LEM lifeboat procedures we worked on in that sim?” Liebergot repeated.
Heselmeyer still stared blankly.
“I think,” said Liebergot, “it’s time we dusted them off.”
The EECOM steeled himself, signed back on the loop, and called to his flight director.
“Flight, EECOM.”
“Go ahead, EECOM.”
“The pressure in O2 tank one is all the way down to 297,” Liebergot said. “We’d better think about getting into the LEM.”
“Roger, EECOM,” Kranz said. “TELMU and CONTROL, from Flight,” he called to the LEM’s environmental and guidance officers.
“Go, Flight.”
“I want you to get some guys figuring out minimum power needed in the LEM to sustain life.”
“Roger.”
“And I want LEM manning around the clock.”
“Roger that too.”
At the same time this conversation was taking place, Jack Swigert, on the center couch in Odyssey, looked at his instrument panel and discovered that while the oxygen readings might have been grim on the ground, they were downright dire in the spacecraft. Squinting through the growing darkness of his powered-down ship, where the temperature had fallen to a chilly 58 degrees, Swigert saw that his tank one pressure was down to a bare 205 pounds per square inch.
“Houston,” he said, signing back on the air, “it looks like tank one O2 pressure is just a hair over 200. Does it look to you like it’s still going down?”
“It’s slowly going to zero,” Lousma responded. “We’re starting to think about the LEM lifeboat.”
Swigert, Lovell, and Haise exchanged nods. “Yes,” the command module pilot said, “that’s what we’re thinking about too.”
With an OK to abandon ship at last granted by the ground, the crew wasted little time in getting started. Assuming the men were entertaining any hopes of getting home, they could not just take up residence in the LEM and let their fading mother ship sputter to a halt like a car out of gas on a country road. Rather, since Odyssey
