Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

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.

Mission Control told the crew to shut down the fuel cells to prevent the loss of their oxygen. Lovell:

“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 O 2leak 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 O 2tank 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 O 2pressure 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 would have to be used at the end of the flight for re-entry, the ship would have to be shut off one switch or system at a time so as to preserve the operation of all of its instruments and maintain the calibration of their settings. Under ideal conditions, all three men would handle the job; under current conditions, however, Swigert would have to take care of things on his own, because at the same time Odyssey was being taken off line, Aquarius would have to be brought on line, a two-man task that would have to be completed before the command module expired.

Lovell and Haise swam through the lower equipment bay and into the LEM, where they had broadcast their happy travelogue barely two hours earlier. Haise settled into his spot on the right side of the craft and surveyed the blacked out instrument panel. Lovell floated to his station on the left.

Swigert remained in Odyssey, still shutting down its systems, while Lovell and Haise were working in the LEM configuring the systems of the twin spacecraft. Odyssey’s controls had to be powered down before the LEM’s could be powered up. Swigert then joined Lovel and Haise in the LEM.