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Did an Unnamed MIT Student Save Apollo 13?

Posted by samzenpus on from the cut-your-hair-and-get-a-job dept.

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."

9 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. If True: Shameful by ohnocitizen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:If True: Shameful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      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.

      Albeit shameful, I struggle to find a point here. If said "hippie" didn't care about obtaining credit for something this significant 40+ years ago, care to tell me why the internet masses care so much about this today?

      I guess this is what happens when unemployment rises and people are left to sit at home to champion utterly pointless shit that not even the person they're desperately trying to identify cares about anymore.

    2. Re:If True: Shameful by Rostin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If said "hippie" didn't care about obtaining credit for something this significant 40+ years ago, care to tell me why the internet masses care so much about this today?

      There are cultural norms about when it is and isn't appropriate to toot one's own horn. In this situation, if the guy had gone to the press and claimed credit for the idea or insisted to his superiors that NASA set the record straight, he would have looked extremely petty and not like a "team player." His reputation would have been ruined not only in the public sphere, but among many of his colleagues. You might argue that someone somewhere would give the smart young guy who saved Apollo 13 a chance, but I think that's a nerd fantasy. There are lots of smart grad students. A good personality (read: willingness to play by the rules) is usually as important as smarts.

      This is also far from an isolated occurrence in the sciences. I understand that the grad students of a few Nobel Prize winners have been pretty embittered by the lack of official recognition of their contributions.

    3. Re:If True: Shameful by DerekLyons · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I hope NASA does the right thing and releases the fellow's name.

      What I find dismaying is that you, and Reddit, and probably most of the rest of the 'net have already judged that a junior PR staffer not connected with mission control is telling the truth - and without any evidence or even bothering to ask if this is plausible, are pronouncing NASA guilty.

  2. what a load of bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:what a load of bullshit by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ...the rise of neoliberalism and the resultant Oil Crisis.

      WTF are you blabbering about?

  3. Chronological issues by vlm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  4. I was a long-haired, bearded MIT student then by yesterdaystomorrow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:The Book said it by DerekLyons · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My guess is that the MIT student, if they existed at all, came up with some math that proved that the abort/return approach simply wasn't going to work for some reason (unable to achieve a viable angle for a sucessful reentry, perhaps) and that at least with the slingshot there was a chance.

    NASA analyzed the hell out of every inch of the trajectory pre-flight, *and* had a Mission Control position (RETRO) with a dedicated back room staff who spent the entire flight doing so in real time. If find it not only highly unlikely that NASA wouldn't know that at 'x' position along the trajectory they couldn't execute an abort - but even more unlikely that a MIT student would have the requisite deep understanding of the trajectory and the available computational resources to perform the required calculations within a few hours of the accident.
     
    It is true that MIT was involved in trajectory design and analysis, so it sounds like someone has taken that and expanded it into what amounts as an urban legend. (Also note the individual spreading the story was a junior staffer in NASA's PR department at the time of the accident - not connected with Mission Control at all.)