Apollo 13's cold, miserable trip home After they performed a crucial burn to point the spacecraft back towards Earth, the crew powered down every nonessential system in the spacecraft. Without a source of heat, cabin temperatures quickly dropped down close to freezing. Some food became inedible.
The Apollo 13 malfunction was caused by an explosion and rupture of oxygen tank no. 2 in the service module. The explosion ruptured a line or damaged a valve in the no. 1 oxygen tank, causing it to lose oxygen rapidly.
The command module was dying, quickly. But the lunar lander, docked to the command module, was intact. Under the direction of Glynn Lunney, the flight director whose shift followed Mr. Kranz's, the Apollo 13 astronauts scrambled into the lunar module, which served as their lifeboat.
The command module of Apollo 13 entered Earth's atmosphere and splashed down on target on April 17 at 1:07 PM Eastern Standard Time. The mission has been referred to as a successful failure, in that all the crew members survived a catastrophic accident.
Along with the extreme shortage of water and electrical power, the crew also encountered dangerous levels of carbon dioxide. Plenty of lithium hydroxide canisters, designed to remove the gas from the spacecraft, were on hand in the command module.
Apollo 13 suffered its first unexpected issue two days before liftoff. Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly was exposed to German measles and grounded. His backup, Swigert, joined the team with little time to work alongside his new crewmates before the mission began.
During this flight Haise developed a urinary tract infection and later kidney infections. These caused him to be in pain for most of the trip. Haise was slated to become the sixth human to walk on the Moon during Apollo 13 behind Lovell, who was to be fifth.
The Apollo 13 mission was designated a successful failure because the crew was returned safely even though the odds were stacked against them. The success can be attributed to the amount of training and planning that goes into mission preparation.
Apollo 13 was NASA's third moon-landing mission, but the astronauts never made it to the lunar surface. During the mission's dramatic series of events, an oxygen tank explosion almost 56 hours into the flight forced the crew to abandon all thoughts of reaching the moon.
For the Apollo 13 mission, the blackout was much longer than normal because the flight path of the spacecraft was unexpectedly at a much shallower angle than normal.
With the electrical systems turned off, the temperature approached about 34 degrees Fahrenheit prior to entering the atmosphere. “The instruments did not actually 'freeze. ' They were inoperable with the system turned off. They came to life when we powered up the command module just prior to reentry.
Fifty-six hours in, with the crew nearly 200,000 miles from Earth, an explosion in one of Apollo 13's two oxygen tanks left the command module Odyssey fatally damaged.
"They would have missed the Earth and died a lonely death in space when their oxygen ran out," Chaikin said in the narration, with initial editions including the erroneous information. "Even more chilling," he added, "their bodies would never have returned, because Apollo 13 would have circled in space forever.
Perhaps the most serious single problem encountered during reentry is the heat that develops as the spacecraft returns to the earth's atmosphere. Friction between vehicle and air produces temperatures that exceed 3,000°F (1,700°C). Most metals and alloys would melt or fail at these temperatures.
27 January 1967. One of the worst tragedies in the history of spaceflight occurred on January 27, 1967 when the crew of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed in a fire in the Apollo Command Module during a preflight test at Cape Canaveral.
Take Risks. The crew and mission team of Apollo 13 knew that they had to cut corners and take chances if they were going to survive. From piloting the spacecraft manually to cutting checklists to a minimum, with certain death the alternative, the mission team took calculated risks to ensure their survival.
The review board identified several major factors which combined to cause the fire and the astronauts' deaths: An ignition source most probably related to "vulnerable wiring carrying spacecraft power" and "vulnerable plumbing carrying a combustible and corrosive coolant"
But when Swigert turned on the fans on the second oxygen tank for a routine “cryo stir” on the night of April 13, the damaged wiring caused a spark, starting a fire. At 9:08 pm, with its internal pressure mounting, the tank exploded.
NASA's Apollo 13 was intended to be the third mission to land on the moon, but fate had other plans. Apollo 13 launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida on April 11, 1970. Just three days into the mission, a routine oxygen tank "stir" caused a damaged oxygen tank inside their service module to rupture.
Two Apollo missions were failures: a 1967 cabin fire killed the entire Apollo 1 crew during a ground test in preparation for what was to be the first crewed flight; and the third landing attempt on Apollo 13 was aborted by an oxygen tank explosion en route to the Moon, which disabled the CSM Odyssey's electrical power ...
The Farthest Distance from Earth Reached by Humans. On 15th April 1970, Apollo 13 was 254 km from the lunar surface on the far side of the moon—and 400,171 km above the Earth's surface. This is in fact a Guinness World Record for the farthest distance from Earth reached by humans and still holds to this day.
By the time Apollo 13 came around, the television networks didn't even bother covering the launch because they felt there wasn't enough interest. Apollo 13 was to be the most ambitious mission yet.