Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Seven hours later we prepared for ascent. There was an almost constantly active three-way loop of radio traffic connecting Columbia, Eagle, and Mission Control. We discovered during a long checklist recitation that the ascent engine’s arming circuit breaker was broken off on the panel. The little plastic pin simply wasn’t there. This circuit would send electrical power to the engine that would lift us off the moon. Finally I realized my backpack must have struck it when I’d been getting ready for my EVA.

Neil and I looked at each other. Our fatigue had reached the point where our thoughts had become plodding. But this got our attention. We looked around for something to punch in this circuit breaker. Luckily, a felt-tipped pen fitted into the slot.

At 123 hours and 58 minutes GET, Houston told us, “You’re cleared for takeoff.”

“Roger,” I answered. “Understand we’re number one on the runway.”

I watched the DSKY numbers and chanted the countdown: “Four, three, two, one… proceed.” Our liftoff was powerful. Nothing we’d done in the simulators had prepared us for this amazing swoop upward in the weak lunar gravity. Within seconds we had pitched forward a sharp 45 degrees and were soaring above the crater fields.

“Very smooth,” I called, “very quiet ride.” It wasn’t at all like flying through Earth’s atmosphere. Climbing fast, we finally spotted the landmark craters we’d missed during the descent. Two minutes into the ascent we were batting along at half a mile per second.

Columbia was above and behind us. Our radar and the computers on the two spacecraft searched for each other and then locked on and communicated in a soundless digital exchange.

Four hours after Neil and I lifted off from the Sea of Tranquillity, we heard the capture latches clang shut above our heads. Mike had successfully docked with Eagle. I loosened the elastic cords and reached around to throw more switches. Soon Mike would unseal the tunnel so that Neil and I could pass the moon rocks through and then join Mike in Columbia for the long ride back.

I hadn’t slept in almost 40 hours and there was a thickness to my voice and movements. Still I could feel a calmness rising inside me. A thruster fired on Columbia, sending a shiver through the two spacecraft.

Seven hours later we were in our last lunar orbit, above the far side, just past the terminator into dawn. We had cast Eagle’s ascent stage loose into an orbit around the moon, where it would remain for hundreds of years. Maybe, I thought, astronauts will visit our flyweight locomotive sometime in the future. Mike rode the left couch for the trans-Earth injection burn. Our SPS engine simply had to work, or we’d be stranded. The burn would consume five tons of propellant in two and a half minutes, increasing our speed by 2,000 miles per hour, enough to break the bonds of the moon’s gravity.

We waited, all three of us watching the DSKY. “Three, two, one,” Mike said, almost whispering.

Ignition was right on the mark. I sank slowly into my couch. NASA’s bold gamble with Lunar Orbit Rendezvous had paid off. Twenty minutes after the burn we rounded the moon’s right-hand limb for the final time.

“Hello. Apollo 11, Houston,” Charlie Duke called from Earth. “How did it go?”

Neil was smiling. “Tell them to open up the LRL doors, Charlie,” he said, referring to our quarantine in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory.

“Roger,” Charlie answered. “We got you coming home.”

The moon’s horizon tilted past my window. Earth hung in the dark universe, warm and welcoming.

After the success of Apollo 11, the immediate future of the US space program was a mission every two months. Apollo 12 launched on 14 November 1969. The CSM was named Yankee Clipper, the LEM Intrepid; the crew were Charles Conrad, Richard Gordon and Al Bean. Intrepid was intended to land near an unmanned probe, Surveyor III which, had been on the moon for 31 months. Hamish Lindsay:

Chris Kraft, the Director of Flight Operations said, “Launch has always been an uneasy time for me, and I have always looked forward to a successful separation from the booster. When one adds to this an apprehension caused by bad weather over the Cape, I become even more concerned.”

President and Mrs Nixon were among the large crowd waiting to see the launch, the only time an American President in office witnessed an Apollo launch. As if to prepare this crew of navy aviators for the Ocean of Storms, the launch area was blanketed by rain when Apollo 12 launched into the overcast stratocumulus cloud with a ceiling of only 640 metres above the ground. Rising from Pad 39A at 11.22 am EST in defiance of Mission Rule 1–404, which said no vehicle shall be launched in a thunderstorm, the huge Saturn V vanished into the murk. Observers then saw two bright blue streaks of lightning – right where the rocket had been. Pete Conrad showed why top test pilots are different from the rest of us when 36seconds after liftoff, at a height of 1,859 metres, they were hit by lightning. At 52 seconds they were hit again. The control panel indicators went haywire and the attitude ball began pitching. If the vehicle really was beginning to fly erratically there were only seconds before it would break up and explode.

The abort handle was waiting at Conrad’s elbow, but he calmly announced to the ground controllers, “Okay, we just lost the platform, gang. I don’t know what happened here. We had everything in the world drop out… fuel cell, lights, and AC Bus overload, one and two, main bus A and B out. Where are we going?”

With the master alarm ringing in his ears, Alan Bean thought he knew all the spacecraft’s electrical faults, but looking along the panel of glowing warning lights he couldn’t recognise any of them – he had never seen so many lights before.

Conrad remembers, “I had a pretty good idea what had happened. I had the only window at the time – the booster protector covered the other windows – and I saw a little glow outside and a crackle in the headphones and, of course, the master caution and warning alarms came on immediately and I glanced up at the panel and in all the simulations they had ever done they had figured out how to light all eleven electrical warning lights at once – by Golly, they were all lit, so I knew right away that this was for real.

“Our high bit rate telemetry had fallen off the line so on the ground they weren’t reading us very well on what was happening, so they got us to switch to the backup telemetry system. The ground then got a look at us and they could see that a bunch of things had fallen off the line, but there weren’t any shorts or anything bad on the systems so we elected to do nothing until we got through staging. When we got through staging then we went about putting things back on line.”

Down among the consoles in the Mission Control Center the steady flow of glowing figures from the spacecraft filing past on the screens were suddenly replaced by a meaningless jumble of characters. All the telemetry signals had dropped out!

John Aaron was the EECOM, the Flight Controller in charge of the Command and Service Module electrical system, and he recalled, “You must remember we did not have a live television view of the launch. I was just looking at control screens which only had data and curves on them. The first thing I realised was we had a major electrical anomaly. But I did recognise a pattern. When we trained for this condition with our simulators it would always read zeros. It so happened that a year before I was monitoring an entry sequence test from the Kennedy Space Center, and the technicians inadvertently got the whole spacecraft being powered by only one battery. I remembered the random pattern that generated on the telemetry system, and for some reason just filed it off to the back of my mind. I did go in the office the next day to reconstruct what happened and found this obscure SCE [Signal Condition Equipment] switch. Few people knew it was there, or what it was for. It was lucky I was the EECOM monitoring the test that night and when it turned out that we had the problem, I happened to be the EECOM on the console. I don’t think any other EECOM would have recognised that random pattern. Our simulators did not train us for it, but I saw it through the procedural screwup. Although the test happened a year before, that pattern was etched in my mind, and I am talking about a pattern of thirty or forty parameters. Instead of reading zeros, one would read six point something, another read eight point something, which were nonsense numbers for a 28 volt power system.”