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."

Comments

404 Page

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot, we have a problem.

Re:404 Page

[nmb3000]

404? No...

What we really should do is add onto the existing codes and take the unused 600 section of HTTP codes for Slashdot use.

A few that come to mind:

HTTP 600: Nothing For You To See Here
HTTP 601: Dupe
HTTP 602: Is Having Uncompehensibal Splelling Nad Gramer
HTTP 603: Moderator Points Denied
HTTP 604: Profit Not Found

Any others?

Anniversaries...

[stalefries]

So, will we have to see this article every 5 years now?

Re:Anniversaries...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, will we have to see this article every 5 years now?

Duplicate articles only "every 5 years" would be a great improvement.

Re:Anniversaries...

[orac2]

will we have to see this article every 5 years

Perhaps, but sadly unlikely because the Apollo mission controllers are beginning to pass away at an increasing rate. At lot of them are still in good health, but Sy Liebergot has a list of deceased controllers in his 2003 autobiography, Apollo EECOM that's a page long, and he's said recently that if he released a second edition he'd have to add another bunch of names already: for example, Don Puddy, who played a key role in the post Apollo-10 sim lifeboat procedures team, passed away last November.

Re:Anniversaries...

[Husgaard]

I doubt that we will see another "35th Anniversary of Apollo 13 Splashdown" article in five years.

But this is Slashdot, and nothing seems to be impossible here ;-)

Now *that*s a cool hack!

[FlyByPC]

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.

Re:Now *that*s a cool hack!

[orac2]

To be strictly accurate, the heavy lifting on the trajectory side was done by a bunch of mainframes on the ground, in Houston's Real Time Computer Complex. But as the article says, they didn't have the software to compute how the trajectory of thecojoined CSM and LM would behave using the LM descent engine, so they had to call in a bunch of people to write new software! Then the burn parameters were passed up to be entered into the computer.

Why do people still deny the moon landing?

[Future Man 3000]

If you look at all the stuff we were doing in space, including the heroics that successfully brought the Apollo 13 home, isn't it self-evident that was absolutely within our ability to land on the moon forty years ago?

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.

Since I'm too young...

[tquinlan]

...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.

Re:Since I'm too young...

[orac2]

Quite a few: I'm not dissing Howard's movie: you can't tell a four day (actually, eight year) story in two hours without taking some dramatic license. Hence the article.

It's important to realize how much what-if planning work was done up front, before Apollo 13, so that during the accident, the controllers weren't just making it all up as they went along. In particular, the efforts of the lunar module controllers in this regard are absent from the movie, as are a lot of other key contributions.

Other issues: the CSM power-up sequence was not devised primarily under astronaut Ken Mattingly's auspices, but under EECOM John Aaron. Nor did Mattingly come up with the idea of running power back into the CSM from the LM: Bob Legler, a LM controller, came up with that idea months previously. In the movie, the crew were thrown around by the oxygen tank explosion: in fact it took a few minutes for everyone to realise something very serious had happened. And Kranz never said "Failure is not an option!"

Re:True geeks

[PriceIke]

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.

You sick capitalists and your NASA idolatry

[DmitryProletariat]

You think just because you landed a few capitalist pig astronauts on the moon you're so high faluten and mighty! We Soviets kept men in space for 439 days! We had the first woman in space! We had the first childrens space morning cereal! You bourgeois Amerikan NASA idolists live in delusion over your puny accomplishments. So you Saaaaaved the crew of Apollo 13. Ohhhhhh! I'm SOOOOOOO impressed! You capitalist pigs only exploited this tragedy by turning it into a profit driven Hollysick movie! So that is what you think of your great fearless icons! Fit only for money making propaganda!

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!*

Re:True geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So much more interesting than the Hollywood drivel

[ExtraT]

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!

Re:True geeks

[orac2]

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.

NASA of Then v. NASA of Today

[Space_Soldier]

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.

Re:NASA of Then v. NASA of Today

[fishbowl]

" I wish that NASA of today was as exciting and had
the same respect as back then."

Those of us who were around back then remember it being no less controversial, with just as much skepticism, and the same low regard from the Republicans over a program that was pressed by Democrats.

The main mitigating factor was the idea that the space program would help stem the tide of Communism.

The space age had an enormous impact on popular culture, but the politics were pretty much the same.

Because we didn't!

[Professor S. Brown]

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?

For a great overview, see this book by Kranz

[EQ]

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.

Ahh, the good old days....

[Rick Zeman]

...now all of our science is just to build better weapons systems. Sigh.

I worked for Grumman...

[Banner]

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.

Sad...

[Eminence]

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?