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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.
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.
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
Spock time travels only rarely. It was obviously the doctor.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
The Doctor only saves British space missions.
That's why no Englishman has ever died in Space.
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.
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.
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
Ahh, that's my problem. I do my own work!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
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
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."
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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 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
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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.
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.
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?