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Did an Unnamed MIT Student Save Apollo 13?
lukehopewell1 writes "When the Apollo 13 reported an explosion on board, NASA started a marathon effort to get the three astronauts home. Several options were considered, but history tells how flight director Gene Kranz ordered a slingshot around the moon. The story stayed that way for over 40 years, until this weekend when an ex-NASA press secretary came forward and said that an unnamed MIT grad student came up with the idea to slingshot the spacecraft around the moon. NASA reportedly buried his involvement at the last minute when it was discovered that he was a long-haired, bearded hippie-type.' Now the internet has gone on the hunt to find out who this unnamed hero really is."
Thanks RMS!
Always there to save the world.
Privacy is terrorism.
Probably Noah Wylie or Wil Wheaton.
The only question is...why did he want Nixon to win?
I hope NASA does the right thing and releases the fellow's name. Unless it is a young RMS, who at that time SHOULD have been in undergrad, not goofing around with NASA.
Spock.
The way I remember the options at the time, the slingshot was always in The Book of plans. The path to the Moon for all Apollo flights was made in a way which tossed the craft back toward Earth unless the lunar injection burn was performed behind the Moon. I wrote about the main failure modes and options way back then.
Wondered where he'd gone off to...
0) Oh look, an opportunity to get hits while everyone's talking about the Mars landing;
1) Every academic was a "long-haired, beared hippie-type" in the '60s, the following decade being essentially the '60s until the rise of neoliberalism and the resultant Oil Crisis. And all the decent academics (there are a lot more academics today, but most of them are shit) still are;
2) The slingshot effect was well-known back then;
3) Why turn this into a conspiracy? It's more likely that some MIT guy commented on the idea, but NASA did the hard work of getting the slingshot to work. Ideas are easy - workable implementations of ideas are hard;
4) Thank goodness NASA is still around to do the scientific research. I was getting bored with stories about SpaceX doing a Boeing but giving the first hit for free.
It was Bill Gates.
Think about it: They needed to cover it up, so he was made (against his will) to shave his beard and start wearing suits.
Gates vowed revenge for this, and what better way than to take over the world with computers and make the Curiosity rover run off a modified version of Windows Vista.
Summation 2
said that an unnamed MIT grad student came up with the idea to slingshot the spacecraft around the moon
Now just wait here. The abort plan drawn up in '66 might or might not have been invented by a long haired hippy. Its hard to describe something that obvious as being "invented". The insinuation is the hippy invented it on the fly in '70 during the mission after the O2 tank blew, which is not entirely realistic. By the time the tank blew, the long haired hippy probably got a haircut and a job and a chevvy and maybe even a wife and kid (or two).
Or they may be massively misinterpreting the concept of "inventing". So the tank blows and they're all freaking the F out as you'd imagine, just barely on the sober edge of panic. Visiting hippy who's too stoned to panic says "wow man, just be cool, its early enough in the mission that a AOA is still cool and cosmic, man" plus or minus some weed consumption. Now thats making a valuable observation under severe pressure, not "inventing".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I call bullshit on the "hippy thought it up" story.
A slingshot around the moon for earth return trajectory was a well known and well-studied tactic long before the first unmanned probe was ever even sent to the moon. Slingshots are an elementary part of Orbital Mechanics, the formulas are published in college textbooks of the 1950's and the topic is well-discussed even in sci-fi books of the 30's and 40's.
Continue the path and slingshot back or fire the rockets and turn around, were there any other choices? I'm not sure for what they want to credit the smelly hippie. There is nothing marvelous about the solution, it was the decision that was risky.
every famous person in history has had lots of people working for him/her. Lots of da vinci's and Michelangelo's work was done by their students
I hereby invoke Betteridge's Law of Headlines and answer the question with a resounding "No."
One of the comments in the post this links to claims that it's an urban legend and I think that maybe correct. I remember those times and was an avid follower. Even the earliest Apollo missions had a "go round" bailout if they aborted a landing. Not sure you would call that a "sling shot" but they did know full well the trajectories.
Every Apollo mission up to 13 that went to the moon was already on a trajectory to return it to Earth via slingshot if there was an issue (i.e. SPS engine failed to fire for LOI). Shortly after TLI for Apollo 13, a burn was made to take Apollo 13 off this trajectory in order to reach Frau Mora (their landing site) at a specific time of the lunar cycle to provide good visibility for landing. The Apollo 13 loop around decision was very probably already on the books prior to the flight for just such an eventuality, and while any number of engineers (or hippies) could have initially developed such a burn, it is the flight director's (in this case Gene Kranz and others) who would ultimately review the procedure and make the final decision to perform the burn to return them to their free-return trajectory. To say that an MIT student "saved" Apollo 13 doesn't meet with the facts of the mission.
That sounds unlikely.
a) NASA and the Lunar program had some pretty smart people thinking about every option and outcome (Duh.). Given the way they maneuvered to and around the moon and other celestial bodies before, the 'slingshot' seems quite obvious actually. You might need an engineer with strong math skills to work out the orbit corrections to save fuel for later and come up with some ideas for the details, but the idea itself is quite straight forward. In fact I'm sure they didn't even consider any *other* option. I clearly remember a documentary where they mentioned that one of the problems early on was the power usage for calculating the math needed for the trip around the moon and back with the onboard computers. The engineers responsible had to promise they'd only need the power once to calculate the trajectory and wouldn't need it again thereafter. There had been a shortout and they were low on electricity after all.
b) I doubt that anybody at NASA was in the mood or mindset for answering random phonecalls back then. Or today that is. NASA has hundreds of engineers and specialists on site for every manned mission in case something goes wrong. They don't ask the public to call a hotline when a historic project is about to fail. Sounds like non-sense to me.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Who, at the movie theater, was yelling "THAT IS NOT HOW IT HAPPENED" and then mumbling things like "all the glory to yourself" "selfish bastard" "starfish shirt"
Some one faced a problem and thought of using a sling as the solution. His name must be David.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Clearly, it was Conrad Bennish, Jr.
What is this? Slashdot blogging Gizmodo blogging a weakly verified Reddit AMA? Get real. It's like information laundering. If enough hands touch the information everyone will have to believe it and they'll have forgotten the source anyway!
I hope NASA does the right thing and releases the fellow's name.
While I always love to hear stories where MIT students are the heroes, I find this story a little odd. The lunar-swingby return trajectory was always the abort option. So I'm not sure what this article is implying-- a MIT student said "say, why doesn't NASA implement their backup plan?" and Gene Kranz said "the backup plan! That's it! We never would have thought of that!" ?
With that said, it's worth noting that Apollo 13 had already modified their path from the initial free-return trajectory to one that required an engine burn to put them on the lunar-swingby return, in order to target the desired landing site. The important decision wasn't whether to make a burn to do the return; the real question was which engine to use, since it was not known (at the time) whether the explosion had damaged the main engine on the service module (turns out it had; and they made the right choice.)
It was, of course, actually more complicated than that. IEEE Spectrum has a more detailed timeline and analysis: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/apollo-13-we-have-a-solution-part-2
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
They need not apply
I was 14 years old when Apollo 13 flew. I live in Huntsville Alabama and everybody here was keeping a Close Eye on the Apollo missions. But I remember the loop-around-the-moon plan was in place from the very beginning as a way to Bail Out of the mission and return to Earth without a Lunar Landing. After all, what other option is there. The unique part of the plan was to use the Lunar Module as a Lifeboat to get them back alive.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
if that "phone call" actually took placehow the hell was it able to go through? can random strangers call and just put through to the office where the NASA engineers try to come up with a plan to save the astronauts?
Ug this is stupid this came from an unverified AMA on Reddit. The entire thing is very suspect. I'm extremely annoyed that this has made it onto slashdot. You guys are helping to start a new urban legend/conspiracy. Just stop now please.
Seems NASA has dropped the straight lace attitude since then, as a fellow with long hair and beard can clearly be seen in a recent video...
The space race between NASA and the hippies is more heated than ever, with both of the astronautic super-powers vying to be the first to land a man on the moon. "NASA will win the race to the moon, and the world will see a United States astronaut, not a longhair, walk on the moon before the turn of the decade," Apollo 10 Mission Director Gus Lance said Thursday.
Despite NASA's confidence, hippie-space-program sources report that the moon will be within their reach in mere months. "Freakonauts have already outdistanced NASA in their high rate of success with manned missions throughout the Tibetan Book of the Dead and cosmic voyages Beyond Total Awareness," said Freedog Osmosis, head of the prestigious Haight-Ashbury Center for Astraldynamic Research.
"And current missions are flying higher than ever. Take me, for example. I'm sitting right in front of you. Yet, even as we speak, I'm orbiting at tremendous altitudes." "We are 12 to 16 weeks away from having all the vibes in place to launch, orbit and land a hippie on the moon," Osmosis said, "as well as to return him safely to a big oversized floor pillow after wear-off and subsequent crashpad re-entry burn."
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
The linked story is a great example of why you should never listen to what old men remember about great events and their (often "heroic") part in them. At no time did NASA need some graduate student from MIT to help them with a Guidance 101 type problem on Apollo 13. The difficulty was in getting the Lunar Module prepped quickly enough to make a small burn that would get them on a free return trajectory, the same type used on the previous four Apollo missions to the moon. Apollo 13 was the first to use a less safe trajectory so they could visit a more interesting place, Fra Mauro. There were always many ways out of a pickle and abort guidelines had been carefully developed for different phases of the mission. At the point of Apollo 13's explosion, a direct abort going straight back was never possible, not least because their big engine was in the now dead Service Module. Free return was the only option. There *was* a very famous "hippy" type guy at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, Don Eyles, who was responsible for much of the Lunar Module's landing program. On Apollo 14 he was instrumental in solving a problem that would have prevented that landing and he did get official recognition for it and there are pictures of him with his long hair and mustache. So that's another part of the Gizmodo crap article that is wrong. As far as the photos of the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon go, there were about three pictures taken by Aldrin with Armstrong only incidentally in the frame. The shot with the flag is definitely of Aldrin, as you can see Armstrong taking the picture in the 16mm film taken from the Lunar Module window. Aldrin, unconsciously or deliberately, never took a proper picture of his fellow crew member and commander. It was only after Apollo 12 that a photo specialist at the Houston space center suggested red armbands for the commander to distinguish him in the photos and Jim Lovell, the Apollo 13 commander, never got to show them off, alas.
There was certainly a lot of discussion of this among us at the time. I recall we wondered whether NASA would go for free return or be more radical and use more delta-V in cislunar space to get the astronauts home sooner.
But call up NASA? Be serious. Which of the 100,000 phone numbers would you call? The critical people were busy: they weren't going to talk to some random student. This was all elementary orbital mechanics, somewhat difficult to calculate and execute accurately, but not conceptually difficult at all. The flight team certainly knew this stuff. The real question was what the damaged systems could still accomplish, and that required information well beyond what we had access to. So it never occurred to anybody I know to try being a back seat driver.
The typical fate of grad-student ideas are to be stolen by whoever hears them (and isn't a grad-student). The reward might be a job if the grad-student is supportive of professors and behaves confidently without arguing with anybody who counts.
The free return trajectory maneuver ("slingshot") was well known to NASA engineers, and was actually the default trajectory for all lunar missions before 13. The crew had to specifically fire the engines to enter lunar orbit. If the engines somehow failed to fire, the spacecraft was already on the proper trajectory to swing around the moon and return to earth . 13 was the first mission that was on a different initial trajectory, and required a change in order to get ONTO a free-return, but the "lunar slingshot" concept was obvious to all involved.
The "long-haired hippie at MIT" who saved an Apollo mission was named Don Eyles, and the mission was Apollo 14. Picture of Eyles as he looked in those days here:
http://pophop.tumblr.com/post/7532929166/m-i-t-programmer-don-eyles-posing-in-the-draper
When a loose ball of solder inside the abort switch threatened to cancel the lunar landing, Eyles was called on to write a software patch that would bypass the switch and allow the landing to continue. Full story at the "LM Tales" section of his website, which is largely devoted to his post-Apollo artwork, photography, and sculpture.
http://www.doneyles.com/supersymandala.html
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
no body seems to respect REDDIT around here, but as soon as something juicy and interestign comes out of an AMA or something all the InternetS start HERPing and DERPing about it...
Reddit > Slashdot....
you forgot the crystals
you can't make any transcendent voyages without crystals
and incense
and lsd
and mountain girl...
where are you mountain girl, i need your loving, help me touch the face of the stars baby
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I am sorry, but this is BS as stated. The "Zond" direct return was certainly not unknown to the Apollo scientists. It's called a Zond trajectory because Zond 5 (launched 15 September 1968, returned 21 September) was the first spacecraft to execute it. (This would have been repeated with cosmonauts aboard if NASA hadn't have swapped the Apollo 8 and Apollo 9, putting men in lunar orbit in December, 1968, and thus upstaging a Soviet manned lunar flyby.) That was 2 years before Apollo 13.
I also remember the Zond trajectory was _planned_ as a failure mode option for Apollo. I am sure there is discussion of that in the Apollo planning. I knew about it, and I was in High School at the time so I would bet serious money that Gene Kranz knew of it. I am not sure what the grad student actually contributed, but it wasn't the idea of the trajectory. (If I had to guess, I would bet he worked at the Instrumentation Lab - now Draper Labs - and calculated the delta-V needed to reenter safely, which is not negligible, but not the same as coming up with the idea.)
Since many of the Apollo trajectory guys are still alive, if retired, I bet that someone will counter this in a day or so.
Man, that's not him. The blurb clearly describes him as bearded. This man has no beard.
For what it's worth, I was a student at MIT in the early 1970s. I recall in the summer of 1972 hearing a story from other students that is surprisingly similar in general outline, but not in detail. Obviously, my memory from so long ago isn't perfect, what I heard at the time was a rumor anyway, and I haven't really tried to research anything that would corroborate it. That said...
The story was not about Apollo 13, but about another Apollo mission that had established orbit around the moon. Some sort of faulty sensor reading or stuck switch was preventing the system from preparing the necessary rocket firings to break the astronauts out of lunar orbit and send them home. According to these rumors, NASA identified the author of the control code as an MIT student working at the Charles Stark Draper laboratory, which is affiliated with MIT. An emergency call went out to find him, so that he could patch the code to ignore the faulty switch or sensor.
The claim is that the call was taken by friends, who were concerned by the fact that the student in question, whether long-haired or not, was either drunk or stoned out of his gourd at the time. Nonetheless, the student was alerted. He supposedly uttered the obvious "oh !$!$!" and stumbled off to Draper Lab, where in his reduced condition he patched the code and saved the astronauts.
Very much a rumor/urban legend, but suspiciously similar to the new story about Apollo 13. These certainly were the sorts of stories that floated around MIT at the time. I expect that at least a small percentage of them are true.
Grisly Adams saved the crew? Wow, thats impressive, wonder where Ben was at the time.
So you're saying he was also a UNIX guru?
he may not have a beard, but he does have an epic mustache!
Pointless discussion: we all know it was Gary Sinise.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xpy4w/ama_request_the_mit_grad_student_who_saved_the/c5op0dj
... to save the Tom Hanks movie.
As soon as Apollo 13 left low Earth orbit, it was more or less on a free-return trajectory. All Apollo flights used this in case of a failure. It was a redundancy feature and well known by anyone working with the Apollo program. Hell, it was probably described by the news anchors on TV. And it really isn't much of a slingshot. More like a little gravity perturbation. A real slingshot is like that of Jupiter's gravity slinging New Horizons to Pluto. Stories like these are just misinformation and actually takes away from the facts.
I believe this article requires a reference to Betteridge's Law of Headlines and a "No".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Actually it's not much of a secret. His name is Gordon K. Mandell. He just retired as chief engineer for the FAA in Alaska.
SG
This is an urban legend.
Slashdot seems full of shit nowadays. Things like this are obviously wrong to any trained engineer, but idiots keep putting them on. Just like the Global Warming scam. There are some complete lunatics out there...
This is correct but it took an MIT grad student to work out the math and remind them that a small adjustment with the LEM could make it work.
wtf is it with tech journalism these days? What happened to having 2 unrelated confirmations to every published claim? It's as though fact checking and research is no longer a part of a publisher's tool kit. But Gizmodo is getting good at publishing dubious information just for shock with no verification or background research whatsoever.
Obama et al have pronounced Romney guilty of a felony in insisting that he reveal his tax returns.
What's the difference?
I can't believe that this discussion has gone on this long without giving credit to Al Gore.
Does the subject line ring a bell for you? Why bother going back and getting the story right after we've already buried him with a tribute at a football game, with a military fly-by, against his own wishes, against the wishes of the men he fought beside, and against the wishes of his own family—if you count their concerted objections to the halo of North Korean symbolism.
Slingshot around the moon was a no brainer. The other alternative was to turn around and fire the engines of an engine they had no idea what shape it was in.
Hilarious :)
At no time did NASA need some graduate student from MIT to help them with a Guidance 101 type problem on Apollo 13.
There *was* a very famous "hippy" type guy at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, Don Eyles, who was responsible for much of the Lunar Module's landing program. On Apollo 14 he was instrumental in solving a problem that would have prevented that landing and he did get official recognition for it and there are pictures of him with his long hair and mustache. So that's another part of the Gizmodo crap article that is wrong.
I have read every argument in this story so far, ready to believe this old man. But your informed comment clinches it for me that the story is probably bogus. Then pops the question: why is this story, a controversy soiling NASA's reputation, coming up today, on the day the world celebrates the successful landing of Curiosity? Why the appeal to crowd-sourcing to locate this guy and make as much fuss as possible down in the tubes? Who has interest in doing that? Those who have might get a little surprise, as crowd sourcing, as far as I am reading on Slashdot, is turning from finding the guy to finding who is making up this story and why.
My comment is still quite speculative, I will admit, but this has a strange odor for sure.
Gizmodo stole this content from an interview with a man in his 90's on reddit. Shameless fucks, spreading baseless stuff around like they did some kind of reporting.
Why not link to the original AMA on reddit? Gizmodo has zero to do with this.
No, he was busy filling out sweepstakes entry forms.
emt 377 emt 4
No
So is your entire post. No orders came from any president to 'destroy the documentation', it all went into archives where engineers and historians have happily mining it ever since. NASA has also put tons of it online in various places. Here's the results of a search for "Apollo Guidance" on just one of them... Here's a story about NASA using Apollo era documentation for the Constellation program. (And here's a link to some of the experience reports mentioned in the story.)
Um, no it wasn't. Apollo 8 went into orbit, it did not slingshot.
No, it wasn't. The LEM Lifeboat scenario was first studied around (IIRC) 1967 and was well documented.
Etc... etc...
This from the guy who got almost every single claim verifiable against historical references wrong?
I call BS. How would someone get into grade school, let alone MIT, without having a name?
Come on, this is such BS! How could this NOT have come out _right_ away. The MIT dude would have told his friends, his friends would have told their friends, and next thing you know is you'd be having a sensation.
p.s. plus, may I, an MIT alum myself, ask this -- hippies at MIT? In the 60's?? You kidding me???
While I'm certain that an MIT student could/would have come up with the slingshot idea, in all fairness, there weren't really many different ways to get the spacecraft back to Earth. Either turn around, which uses a lot of fuel, but possibly get back sooner, or use the moon's gravity to turn around, which uses less, but might take longer. Third option would be to speed up, still use the moon, and achieve the same effect. I'm pretty sure at the point that they were deciding what to do, NASA had pretty much every employee awake and on the job. It's a bit presumptuous to assume that none of them came up with the slingshot idea on their own, considering going into an orbit of the moon was part of the initial plan of the mission in the first place.
What I CAN see happening though, is considering the time crunch the engineers were under to figure out what to do and implement that plan before the astronauts died, is that the student submitted the idea immediately, it got added to the list of ideas, and he was given attribution as a result of being the first one to voice it (even though hundreds of others probably had the same idea). The student wasn't really responsible for saving the mission, he just got first post.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
"ex-NASA press secretary came forward and said that an unnamed MIT grad student came up with the idea to slingshot the spacecraft around the moon"
Free-return trajectory was the basis for the moon missions since the era when they were still seriously considering direct ascent (ie, the 1950s). Every iteration of the mission design included it as the default trajectory in order to dela with any of the myriad events which could preclude proper lunar orbit insertion. You can find this in any detailed book on the Apollo development.
This story is complete BS.
He ended the Vietnam war which Kennedy got us into (see chapter 4 of The Pentagon Papers), normalized relations with China, signed the ABM treaty with the former Soviet Union, got Eisenhower to sign the Civil Rights Act, desegregated Southern US schools, and established the Environmental Protection Agency,
He also was the first president to propose a national healthcare plan:
http://www.everydaycitizen.com/2009/09/ted_kennedy_richard_nixon_and.html
"Asked about his greatest regret as a legislator, Ted Kennedy would usually cite his refusal to cut a deal with Richard Nixon on health care."
Ted Kennedy also shot it down when Carter tried to do the same thing, according to a 60 Minutes interview:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/16/jimmy-carter-ted-kennedy-health-insurance_n_720356.html
"they might want to look into the actions of Lewis Sinko who was documentation manager for the project Apollo .. Orders were sent down from President Nixon and President Ford to destroy the documents"
Did they also manage to erase any historical documents as to the existence of this Lewis Sinko?
AccountKiller
Sign of our times, when unarmed sounds more newsworthy than unnamed...
April 1st already?
Original story is an IAMA on Reddit
Bot Assisted Blogging
Here is the real source instead of a Shitmodo link:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xove1/iama_97_year_old_that_worked_apollo_missions_1/