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35th Anniversary of Apollo 13 Splashdown
orac2 writes "35 years ago today, the crew of the Apollo 13 mission splashed down in the Pacific, after a harrowing four days following an oxygen tank explosion aboard their spacecraft. If you've only seen the Ron Howard movie, IEEE Spectrum has an article about what really went on in mission control to save the crew, with interviews with Gene Kranz, etc,and including a previously unreported hack the lunar module controllers had to come up with in real-time just to turn on the LM."
There's no lieing in movies!
Slashdot, we have a problem.
So, will we have to see this article every 5 years now?
-stalefries
My favorite scene is when Tom Hanks says to the President over the radio to Houston: "I gotta pee", at which point his 55 IQ-lets him open the airlock to step outside. He had that horrid urine problem at least until John Coffee cured it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Convert a LEM into a lifeboat, work out the proper equipment sequence to keep the power drain down to a minimum level, determine the correct trajectory with a "computer" roughly as powerful as a modern wristwatch, cobble together some CO2 scrubbers to fit where they weren't supposed to, and save three lives in the process. Tops pretty much anything else I've seen.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Now we're looking at Mars, but there's only so much duct tape we can wrap around these shuttles. I wish some of the enthusiasm and can-do attitude towards space that we had in the early days would return so that this next trek could be adequately funded and researched.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
...and was born after the actual mission, that movie is "what I remember" about the Apollo 13 mission. Thankfully, it was well done, and reasonably accurate. It's good to see that we've got further background thanks to the Slashdot story.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
What I loved about the movie "Apollo 13" was that it celebrated the true heroism exhibited by the "geeks" at NASA. I remember reading editorials from feminist man-haters whining about how all the men in the movie were, well, men, and white men, which is somehow worse. That kind of criticism really made me ill. I felt really sorry for the kind of person who would attack a movie for being sexist or even cheuvanist simply because it shows a group of white men being heroes, even if it is historically accurate.
It's not often you see a group of actual, Coke-bottle-glasses, pocket-protector, polyester-pants GEEKS acting in concert to save lives presented in movies these days. (Usually they are sexed-up CSI-types. Yeah, sure.) But damnit, those boys (and girls) at NASA really do have people's lives in their hands, and each and every successful, boring old manned mission is a tremendous risk and a testament to the genius and sheer balls of the American Nerd.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
You bourgeois capitalist Amerikan's make me sick; stealing surpluss labor from the masses for your precious French perfume. BAH! Against the brick wall for you!
*bang!*
Clearly they should've made Richard Nixon a black woman in a wheelchair named Regina Nixon and had her wheel down to NASA, build a rescue ship, fly into space and save them. Also, this would allow for the pivotal scene where her paralysis can't stop her from spacewalking.
It always amazes me how much more interesting and captivating a truthful and detailed account is, than any kind of "sexed up" hollywwod adaptation of it!
As the article points outs, the controllers agree that Howard's movie points out the sense of what went on, even if they also all agree it fictionalized a fair amount of what happened: for example it was John Aaron, not Ken Mattingly, who did the heavy lifting on the CSM power up sequence, and the idea of getting power from the LM to support the CSM, by running power backward through the umblicals, was developed months beforehand by Bob Legler.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
I was going to MIT in 1995 when the film was released. Everybody at the adjacent Sloan School of Management was talking about it and called it a perfect case study of great project management and team work. The article confirms that - great read.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I wish that NASA of today was as exciting and had the same respect as back then. The leadership did not say, "Sorry Apollo 13, you're dead, and we won't spend any resources in a futile attempt to save you." Two shuttle disasters later due to bureaucracy and they don't even have the balls to save Hubble let alone mount a human trip to Mars.
We didn't go to the moon! The shadows aren't parallel! The Van-Allen belt would have fried them all instantly! Why is there no huge flame coming out of the bottom of the lander? Last time I set fire to some petrol it burnt with a fire, what, is the petrol they used not flammable or something? Why no photographs of the stars? Why not point a telescope at the moon and look at the flag? We can see stars literally hundreds of miles away, why not a flag on the moon?
Shitram Brown, PhD
Professor of Mathematics
Cameras must be focused on what they are to capture, and particularly the blurring of the vastness of space overpowers the tiny points of light from stars in a monochrome camera. Of course in simulation computer addition of space to stage in films is simple and contains all details, but it is what is fake.
> how come the camera's they took with them are all
> so shitty?
A Nikon F wasn't shitty then, and it's not at all bad today.
Since everybody is scrambling for digital cameras and nobody cares about film anymore, you can get great cameras and lenses for cheap now.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Failure is not an Option By Gene Kranz -- the link goes to a google search for the book. (Choose your own bookseller - no amazon link whoring).
Gene Kranz (the guy with the serious crewcut) tells the whole story of how they got to the point to where the "geeks" could make a life and death difference in this situation, and then how they managed to pull it off. Its a great study of real engineering by real engineers under incredible time pressure, with the lives of people and the hopes of the nation in their hands.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
...now all of our science is just to build better weapons systems. Sigh.
"How secret is it, not even you elected Senators can gain access."
Civilians are normally denied access to secure military areas. I'm sure your Senator wouldn't be allowed to wander around the Pentagon either, but I can't regard this as evidence of a big secret conspiracy.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Hey, I didn't know Roland Emmerich was posting on Slashdot! You've got another winner plot there!
I did Science at GCSE level (UK highschool exams), and went on to do chemistry and physics at ALevel (2 year further education before University) and on the first day at Alevel standard, they told us 'forget everything youve learnt up until now, its all untrue, just a means of getting some basic science education'. And true to form, everything that we had learnt at GCSE wasnt any help at all at Alevel standard.
And Ive been told that if you went on to do degree level physics and chemistry, you are pretty much told exactly the same. Whats the point, why not just teach the real facts at all levels?!
sigh, most military bases have their own rules, the land is government property and they can deny anyone they want. that's why military and their family have id's to get on base. elected officials are not military personnel. now something like groomlake that is a testing ground of advanced weapons should not be shown to anyone and everyone, especially not politicians since they are usually easily bribed
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
. . . for the HISTORY of mankind, those in power lied to everyone else. Gallileo was put in jail because of what he knew. Countless others were executed.
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. -- Voltaire
In the late 80's (Flight Test Engineer). A lot of the guys who worked on the LEM and where there during the accident were still around. Some sat next to me. I got to hear some really great stories about what happened, and the things they had to do.
My favorite was that they (Grumman) got everyone who had anything to do with the program rounded up, put in a large room, and then they put an armed guard at the door. You could leave to go to the bathroom, that was it. They all stayed in there working on solutions and answering questions until Apollo landed, and apparently noone even complained.(Try that these days!)
Also it was a tradition at Grumman to point to the LEM and what it did, and how well it was made. It set a very high standard that we were all expected to live up to, and were often reminded of.
Can you say machine code?
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
If I were a mission controller and asked about this stuff, it would probably go like this:
asked within 5 years: good informative details
asked after 5-10 years: less details: you'd have more if you asked earlier
asked after 10-15 years: way less details: you'd have much more if you asked earlier
asked after 15-20 years: refuses to answer: this is pointless, you should have asked me when it was fresh in my mind
asked after 20-25 years: refuses to answer
asked after 25-30 years: refuses to answer
asked after 30-35 years: I don't remember anything significant, but let's talk about it, old people like to talk!!
All those Apollo anniversaries make me sad. 35 years is my whole life, I was born the same year Apollo 13 made its epic return to Earth. And what happened through my whole life with space exploration? Are we further than we were in 1970? All that's left from the grand dreams of the period are some old shuttles, that make news when they fly at all, a space station which we wouldn't be able to operate without Russian (paid) help and a huge, costly government agency that produces lots of nice animations, small droids and very, very little substance - and tons of SF movies. In our silver screen dreams we have already conquered whole galaxy, in reality we hardly moved.
I know it's a harsh judgment. But technologically speaking we could have been walking on Mars a decade ago, we could have been visiting Moon regularly, we could have been sending dozens of automated probes each year not just a few. Isn't that sad?
I think it is each time I have to ask myself: will I live long enough to see anything to even match, let alone outshine Apollo achievements?
Hear hear. Well said sir. I'm a pretty cold fish and have gotten teary eyes maybe a half dozen times in my adult life, but I was certainly teary when I saw the movie and the excellent documentary. As a glasses and polyester wearing (at least back in the day) nerd, the performance of the ground crew at NASA then (and in every mission, really) is the most inspiring thing thing I've seen in my life. To each their own, but for me, the space program, especially in the old days, is truly Heroic. It's the source of my patriotism. Truth be told, I'd probably give up everything I have for even an insignificant job at Johnson just so that, when I died, I could say I had given something to that magnificent organization. *sigh* Maybe next time around.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
> "Twelve amps is about as much power as a vacuum cleaner uses."
No, that's the amount of *current* a vacuum cleaner *might* use. It says nothing about its power at all.
I'm such a pedant.
Does that mean the President isn't allowed to just stroll into Area 51 and take a look around?
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Like I didn't see that coming? Yeah. I'd consider it. I was on a business trip once in Orlando and drove over to the "space coast" alone just to see it. As I drove by a major installation (can't remember which), I saw some service vehicle entering through the gates and had the sharp realization that I'd rather be in that service vehicle because they we a part of it all and I was not. If I was on the janitorial crew, I'd be "in" and from there, I'd focus on my next objective. Maybe I'd work my way up to the gift shop some day! There's no other organization that I feel that way about so no night-shift toilet-cleaning offers from Microsoft, please.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
The article says it was Ed Smylie plus his team, but they'd begun working on it themselves almost immediately after they heard the crew were in the LM. It wasn't an issue of mission control giving them the job after they noticed the CO2 going up, as the movie shows, but mission control finding that, when they needed help, someone had already been working on the problem for hours, saving a lot of time. It's that kind of proactive culture that really made the difference, just as with the the LM lifeboat procedures.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
You've obviously never seen Stargate. Senators get to see cool shit all the time (and screw it up good too).
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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you'd have made some sense.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The Apollo crews used modified Hasselblad 500EL/M's loaded with 70mm film, not a standard 35mm SLR...
a po llo.photechnqs.htm
a 11 /a11-hass.html
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/
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Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
You know, when I first read your post I nodded my head understanding your position - though not really agreeing with it, I understood it. But the more I looked at everyone else's posts, the more I realize that your opinion is pretty widespread - and, in my opinion, it's a pretty cynical and clouded view.
I guess I see the state of space exploration differently. Instead of all the glitz and glamor of manned space flight from the past, the focus is shifting. Space exploration is undergoing a maturing phase. To the naked eye, I can see how it may look like things have stagnated, but that's really not true. Yes, the equipment is getting older. Yes, we've not bothered to repeat some of the past successes in favor of attempting new ones. And yes, NASA's goals are sometimes less obvious to the general public while the failures are more pronounced. But the dreams and the talent were not lost with the sixties! If you think that I can see why you'd be crying in your Cheerios.
Look - the focus has shifted some from manned space flight to research. The focus is shifting from a government run program to the private sector. Things can't always move at break-neck speed. But, if you look at the progress made in less than half a century, it adds up to more than was made in all humankind's existence prior. The dreams aren't dead and it isn't at all boo-hoo-sad. I believe your perspective, like many people's, is just narrowed to your acute view from your short lifetime. Look at it from a different standpoint - pushing aside all the mire of politics and funding and failure and memories of glamorous missions from the past - push all that aside and looking at it from what we as a species still dream to accomplish. And if history is any indicator, we'll keep finding a way to move forward. Maybe not fast enough for you to recognize it, but still faster than humanity has moved ever before.
I have to agree with the other anonymous coward: most people would have worked night and day in that situation.
I'd ask anyone who would not willingly do the same without complaint to remove themselves from the human population, but such a person doesn't exist (though a few might claim they would when not in that position) so there is no point.
Back when we first quit the migratory life to farm we made a lot of great strides, but what has changed since then? We still grow the same corn. Sure we have tractors now, but even they have not advanced in years again.
There are points in time where everything comes together and makes what seems like giant leaps. However they are not as much as they seem. Things have to build for a long time before the technology is ready for the leap. Then we make the leap quick, and have to settle down because there is very little more we can.
Computers have been advancing fast for years, but there is evidence that Moore's law is coming to an end. (though there is some hope that it might continue for a few more years) That is the way everything is.
He is joking.
He's raising the standard array of moon-hoax objections.
Sadly, they sound about that stupid.
you should also watch 'The Dish'. It's very good.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Uh, you do realize don't you that the Hubble is a lifeless hunk of hardware? Oh, and Apollo 13 was a MANNED mission, and the rescue was about saving mens lives? We can always build another telscope.
It may have been implemented by Scotty, but Spock came up with the idea.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Just a nit, but the LM was more popularly known as the Lunar Excursion Module.
Wait ... they performed no Excursions on this trip? >>>Never mind. >;-)
My sig is immuin to spel-cheks
Actually, by the time the LM flew, they'd officially lost the 'E' from the name, but everyone involved still pronounced LM as 'lem' anyway. But in the documentation, it's always written as LM.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
That nay be true for program documentation but NASA has traditionally called it the LEM as noted in this 1999 NASA press release.
Sigs? We dont need no steenking sigs!
Amen. History as it happened, credit where credit is due. If a bunch of white male nerds saved the day, let them be the heros for heaven's sake. A few complainers give the rest of us women a bad name.
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
One thing that struck me from reading that article is the enormous amount of flexibility in both materials and design of the spacecraft then compared to spacecraft now. I know many many people here on slashdot have pointed out that the escape systems on the shuttles were dropped in order to save money, but that's not the entire problem.
From what I gather, the guys in mission control had to jump through many hoops to get things to work after the explosion, but firstly, they had practiced almost every possible problem, (the use of LM power to run the mission shortly after launch although it was blocked because of dead CM batteries and the CO2 filters which were recognised as necessary immediatley by one guy as soon as he heard the LM was to be used).
The design and materials were extremely primitive by today's standards, but relays are a lot easier to reconfigure than a modern computer chip and the simplicity of the filters meant that with basic materials they could be reconfigured.
In other words, the machines were vastly more robust than modern systems.
And then there's the planning. They had actually taken, although not seriously enough initially, but later someone had decided to check that contingency out all the same.
With the shuttles, there has never been a way to fix anything if the machine would fuck up in orbit. Nada. Costs too much. And what really absolutely amazes me is that NASA, that spends around $400 million on a single shuttle launch never thought about renting or buying 2 or 3 Russian Soyuz craft to be ready on a permanent basis in case something happened in orbit, and that even though Soyuz launches only cost a tiny fraction of shuttle launches, are far easier and faster to prepare and launch, and don't even cost much at all if they aren't launched and everything goes well.
And no one, even after Challenger in 86, thought about checking out the shuttle regularly in orbit.
In some ways, it's almost criminal neglect. What happened to NASA?
Since you're picking nits, the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) was renamed to just the Lunar Module (LM, but still pronounced "lem") shortly before the first lunar flights.
Don't know why -- maybe to save ink, for all I know -- but LM is the correct terminology for the actual lunar flight era. Cute graphics on integrated circuits aside.
-- Alastair
Can you say machine code?
FORTRAN IV !
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
Because, for example, Newton's laws can be learned in third grade. And they are right 99.999% of the time. Special relativity requires a hefty background of math to understand.
This is a bit extreme, but the fact is that what you learn is still helpful even though it may be "wrong" from a precise standard.
This year marks the 35th anniversary of Apollo 13, but it's also the 10th anniversary of Ron Howard's "Apollo 13".
There's an Apollo 13 Anniversary Edition DVD out, which includes the IMAX version!
There's more info at IMDB and Google Reviews.
Good quote:
When the shuttle first flew, there was a concern about the tiles. I remember stories about how they flew the shuttle over a telescope in Hawaii to check the tiles. I also remember talk about a device that would squirt an ablative goo into the cavity of any missing tile. Lately, I hear that there's no way to repair tile damage in orbit. What ever happened to this device?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Terry Pratchett et. al. sum it up nicely in "The Science of Discworld". It's all 'lies to children' - for a certain interpretation of 'lie'.
When you first learn the speed of gravity, you're told it's 9.8m/s^2 (or imperial equivalent). Not that it changes with altitude or where you are on the Earth's surface. Granted the differences are tiny, but they're tiny details that only serve to confuse when you're first learning such concepts.
When I first learnt about diodes, I was told that above a certain voltage, they turn on and current can flow. Not that it's an exponential curve. Not that there's a reverse breakdown region where, at high voltages, diodes can work backwards (Zener diodes exploit this).
It's the same principle when a little kid is told "it's for your own good". Three year-olds don't care about why icecream alone does not a meal make.
you should watch the movie "The Reluctant Astronaut".
Is your president considered to be a civilian?
Not quite... Actually, it's the glare of the lunar landscape. The terrain is so bright that it completely drowns out the stars. If you stood on the Moon and pointed the camera at the sky, with no land in the frame, you could photograph stars, but the astronauts were more interested in photographing the Moon and themselves on it - something new - rather than the same stars we see every night from Earth.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
the difference is, the aritcle was written for people like you or me, who can understand the technical intricacies.
However, joe public would not have understood, and woudl have simply turned off. Hence the dramatisation, and dumbing down, in the movie.
Have a nice day!
35 years? Geeze! I'm getting old.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
It amazes me that there are still people who are gullible enough to believe we actually went to the moon.
It's the same people who measure the distance variations between the earth and moon by hitting the laser targets left on the moon.
They did leave the reflectors behind.
The truth shall set you free!
I use this saying when helping someone with a very initial debugging and it seems it is not possible to get a program running without crashing or lockup.
By the way, NOVA did an Apollo 13 show with extensive interviews of Jim Lovell and Gene Kranz -- much like the Beatles documentary that gave a lot of airtime to George Martin -- and I never saw the need to see the Ron Howard film, although Harrison Schmidt, the geology PhD who went to the Moon, tells audiences of his talk to go see it. Who am I to argue with a guy who actually went to the Moon whether the Ron Howard film is worth seeing?
"So, if YOU were ELECTED to the United States Senate, and were entrusted with the power of your office, to protect your constituents, and you requested to see Area 51 and were denied, you would be okay with that?"
Of course. I'd be quite alarmed if my status as a mere member of the Senate were to supersede the security structure of the military.
The Senator is no more or less a "civilian" than any of his constituents, unless of course he is *also* military personnel.
Your argument presupposes that there is a secret coverup conspiracy related to "Area 51", which is a premise that relatively few people seriously accept.
After all, everybody knows the aliens and the spacecraft were moved to Area 52.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Very true! (And I've no idea why this post was modded "offtopic!")
Mayor Bob McIntyre: You've just got to tell them!
Cliff Buxton: That we lost Apollo 11?
Mayor Bob McIntyre: Well, I wouldn't say that first.
Cliff Buxton: What would you say first?
Mayor Bob McIntyre: How about "hey fellows you'll never guess what happened..."
----------------
Cliff Buxton: Glenn, come here.
Glenn Latham: What?
Al Burnett: Every coordinate in this book has been changed.
Glenn Latham: Yeah... I changed them.
Al Burnett: You what?
Glenn Latham: I changed them.
Al Burnett: Why?
Glenn Latham: Because they were wrong.
Al Burnett: Why were they wrong?
Glenn Latham: Dunno.
Cliff Buxton: No, what about them was wrong?
Glenn Latham: Oh! Well, the figures NASA gave us were for the northern hemisphere... and we're in the southern hemisphere? I can change them back but then you'd be pointing in the wrong direction...
Cliff Buxton: Glenn, it might be a good idea for you to tell us these things.
Glenn Latham: Oh, sure, I just didn't wanna worry you... Cuppa tea, Al?
Elliot Gould will get to the bottom of this. (Capricorn One)
The best book on the Apollo 13 mission is 13: The Flight That Failed by Henry S. F. Cooper. (The link is to Amazon.com.)
I first read it in 1972, when it was first released. If you're interested in understanding the Apollo program, this book may be the best place to start. Telling the story of Apollo 13, Cooper introduces the flight controllers and explains how they work together. He provides a foundation for understanding ANY Apollo mission.
The official NASA line was always that we had detailed plans ready for any possible contingency. It wasn't true. Cooper's book shows how mortal men, armed with a slide rules, sharp intellects, and a deep understanding of their machines, invented their way out of a series of completely unforeseen problem.
I've read the book about five times. It never takes me much more than a day to read it, because once I've started, I just can't put it down. Highly recommended.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.