Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

“Negative, Joe.”

“The next step is for you or Jim to execute a push of 0.5 feet per second with four jets from the LEM, have Jack perform the separation, then execute a pull at the same 0.5 feet per second in the opposite direction. Got that?”

“Go that. When do you want us to do this?”

“About thirteen minutes from now. But it’s not time critical.”

Lovell cut into the line. “Can we do it anytime?”

“That’s affirmative. You can jettison whenever you’re ready.”

With clearance from the ground to proceed, Swigert shot up the tunnel into Odyssey and took his position in front of the jettison switches in the center of his instrument panel. Lovell and Haise went to their windows. Near each of their stations, the three men had already left cameras floating, in the hope of photographing the service module’s presumably blast-damaged exterior. Swigert had already taken the precaution of wiping Odyssey’s five windows clear of condensation, to provide an unobscured view to the outside.

“Houston, Aquarius,” Lovell called. “Jack’s in the command module now.”

“Real fine, real fine,” Kerwin said. “Proceed at any time.”

“Jack!” the commander shouted up the tunnel. “You ready?”

“All set when you guys are,” the call came back.

“All right, I’ll give you a five count, and on zero I’ll hit the thrusters. When you feel the motion, let ’er go.”

Swigert shouted a “roger,” reached over with his left hand and picked up his big Hasselblad, then positioned the index finger of his right hand over the SM JETT switch. His paper “NO” flapped to the left of it. Lovell, in the LEM, took his camera in his left hand and his thruster control in his right. Haise picked up his camera as well. “Five,” Lovell called up the tunnel, “four, three, two, one, zero.”

The commander eased his control upward, activating the jets and nudging the two-spacecraft stack into motion. In the command module, Swigert responded immediately, snapping the service module switch.

“Jettison!” he sang out.

All three crewmen heard a dull explosive pop and felt a simultaneous jolt. Lovell then pulled down on the controller, activating an opposite set of nozzles and reversing course.

“Maneuver complete,” he called.

At their separate windows, Lovell, Swigert, and Haise leaned anxiously forward, raised their cameras, and flicked their eyes about their patches of sky. Swigert had chosen the big, round hatch window in the center of the spacecraft, but pressing his nose against it now he saw… nothing. Jumping to his left, he peered out Lovell’s window and there too saw nothing at all. Scrambling across to the other side of the spacecraft, he banged into Haise’s porthole, scanned as far as the limited frame would allow him, and there, too, came up empty.

“Nothing, damnit!” he yelled down the tunnel. “Nothing!”

Lovell, at his triangular window, swiveled his head from side to side, also saw nothing, and looked over to Haise, who was searching as frantically as he was and finding just as little. Cursing under his breath, Lovell turned back to his glass and all at once saw it: gliding into the upper left-hand corner of the pane was a mammoth silver mass, moving as silently and smoothly and hugely as a battleship.

He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. The service module moved directly in front of his window, filling it completely; receding ever so slightly it began to roll, displaying one of the riveted panels that made up its curved flank. Drifting away a little more, it rolled a little more, revealing another panel. Then, after another second, Lovell saw something that made his eyes widen. Just as the mammoth silver cylinder caught an especially bright slash of sun, it rolled a few more degrees and revealed the spot where panel four was – or should have been. In its place was a wound, a raw, gaping wound running from one end of the service module to the other. Panel four, which made up about a sixth of the ship’s external skin was designed to operate like a door, swinging open to provide technicians access to its mechanical entrails, and sealing shut when it came time for launch. Now, it appeared, that the entire door was gone, ripped free and blasted away from the ship. Trailing from the gash left behind were sparkling shreds of Mylar insulation, waving tangles of torn wires, tendrils of rubber liner. Inside the wound were the ship’s vitals – its fuel cells, its hydrogen tanks, the arterial array of pipes that connected them. And on the second shelf of the compartment, where oxygen tank two was supposed to be, Lovell saw, to his astonishment, a large charred space and absolutely nothing else.

The commander grabbed Haise’s arm, shook it, and pointed. Haise followed Lovell’s finger, saw what his senior pilot saw, and his eyes, too, went wide. From behind Lovell and Haise, Swigert swam frantically down the tunnel holding his Hasselblad.

“And there’s one whole side of that spacecraft missing!” Lovell radioed to Huston.

“Is that right,” Kerwin said.

“Right by the – look out there, would you? Right by the high-gain antenna. The whole panel is blown out, almost from the base to the engine.”

“Copy that,” said Kerwin.

“It looks like it got the engine bell too,” Haise said, shaking Lovell’s arm and pointing to the big funnel protruding from the back of the module. Lovell saw a long, brown burn mark on the conical exhaust port.

“Think it zinged the bell, huh?” Kerwin asked.

“That’s the way it looks. It’s really a mess.”

The next task was to power up Odyssey.

In the cockpit of Aquarius, Lovell looked at Swigert and motioned him to the tunnel. Unlike the reading of the power-up checklist fourteen hours earlier, the execution of the list would be a simple matter, requiring less than half an hour’s work by the command module pilot.

As the first switch was thrown, sending a surge of power through the long, cold wires, Lovell braced for the sickening pop and sizzle indicating that the condensation soaking the instrument panel had indeed found an unprotected switch or junction and shorted the ship right back out. It was a sound he had first heard over the Sea of Japan and one he clearly hoped he would never hear again. But as the power-up cockpit proceeded, Swigert threw his first breaker and his second, and his third, and soon, all the crewmen heard was the reassuring hum and gurgle indicating the spacecraft was coming back to life.

EECOM John Aaron knew that the rute of energy consumption was critical. Lovell:

The way Aaron had ciphered things out, the ship could afford to pull no more than 43 amps of juice if it hoped to stay alive for the full two hours of reentry. But, having won the argument in room 210 over when to turn the telemetry on, he wouldn’t know if he was actually staying within this power budget until the command module was completely powered up and the data started streaming back from the ship. If it turned out that Odyssey was consuming juice above the 43 amp level, even for a short while, there was a real chance its batteries would be exhausted before it ever hit the ocean.

When the readings came back, they showed Odyssey’s power consumption was 2 amps higher than the level which would last. They identified the instruments which were consuming the extra power as being back-up systems which could be shut down. This brought power consumption back to the 43 amp level which would last until splash down. The LEM was now expendable but Haise was in a very bad shape.

“Man,” Lovell muttered, “you are a mess.” Moving behind Haise, the commander wrapped him in a bear hug to share his body heat. At first the gesture seemed to accomplish nothing, but gradually the trembling subsided.