Apollo XIII
Despite the bad luck associated with the number 13
(the ship was
launched on April 11, 1970 (4/11/70) - 4 plus 1 plus 1 plus 7 plus 0
= 13 - at 1:13 Houston time, which in military time is 13:13, and
Apollo 13, following its scheduled flight plan, passed into the moon's
gravitational field on April 13), the crew
went ahead with the mission.
Jim named the primary
spacecraft 'Odyssey' because it means "a long voyage marked by
many changes of fortune", and the lunar exploration module (LEM)
after Aquarius
as a tribute to the Aquarius of Egyptian mythology, the
water carrier who brought fertility and knowledge to the Nile Valley.
The crew was scheduled to land on the Moon at the Fra Mauro
mountain range, but within minutes after their last television
broadcast to earth on April 13 it became clear that the mission
was in
big trouble
.
The
ship's oxygen tanks had exploded into space, threatening the ship's
occupants with only 3 hours to stay alive. To calm the crew, Mission
Control said "...in the meantime...tonight's movie, shown in the lower
equipment bay, will be John Wayne, Lou Costello, and Shirley Temple
in 'The Flight of Apollo 13'..." - an eerie foreshadowing of what has
come to pass - the Apollo 13
movie
.
The
crew continued experiencing many technical problems and had to
leave the command module and climb into the LEM (meant to land
on the moon and sustain 2 people for 2 days). Crammed together
through four days of floating through stars
they couldn't see, the three astronauts
used very primitive celestial
navigation techniques to determine where they were
and how to get back to earth. They could easily have made an error,
missing their trajectory and shooting past the earth 40,000 miles off
course into orbital oblivion, but their calculations worked - the
thrusters fired properly and they were headed for home.
Despite continued and tremendous peril, on Friday,
April 17, 1970
Apollo XIII splashed down safely with all occupants intact in the
Pacific Ocean. Jim and the crew were met by his wife Marylin, who
had been escorted to the meeting site in Hawaii by President Richard
Nixon.
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