The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Two rows down and one console over, Chuck Deiterich, an off-duty retrofire officer, or RETRO standing behind his accustomed console, and Jerry Bostick, an off-duty flight dynamics officer, or FIDO, could not hear Kranz and Kraft’s discussion, but they knew the options as well as their bosses. Though it was Kraft and Kranz and Lunney who would ultimately decide the ship’s route home, it was Deiterich and Bostick and the other flight dynamics specialists who would have to come up with the protocols to pull the plan off. At the FIDO station, Bostick pushed his microphone out of range of his mouth, and leaned toward Deiterich.

“Chuck,” he said quietly, “How do we all want to do this thing?”

“Jerry,” Deiterich answered, “I don’t know.”

“I assume we’re ruling out Odyssey’s engine.”

“Absolutely.”

“I assume we’re going around the moon.”

“Absolutely.”

“And I assume we want to get them on free return as quick as possible.”

“Definitely.”

After a moment Bostick said, “Then I suggest we get our shit together fast.”

Close to a quarter of a million miles away, in the crowded cockpit of Aquarius, the men on whose behalf Bostick and Deiterich would be working had more elemental things on their minds than a return-to-Earth engine burn. Settling into his two-man spacecraft with his three-man crew, Jim Lovell had the chance to look around at the hand circumstance had dealt him. He did not like what he saw.

It was 58 degrees and falling inside the LEM but there was plenty of food because they had enough for a 10-day trip. Lovell:

Lovell tried a pitch-changing maneuvre from the LEM but the centre of gravity of the combined spacecraft made such maneuvres very awkward.

Capcom told Aquarius what they had decided. Lovell:

“Also Aquarius,” the Capcom now said, “we’d like to brief you on what our burn plan is. We’re going to make a free-return maneuver of 16feet per second at 61 hours. Then we’re going to power down to conserve consumables, and at 79 hours we’ll make a PC + 2 burn to kick what we’ve got. We want to get you on the free-return course and powered down as soon as possible, so how do you feel about making a 164 foot-per-second burn in 37 minutes?”

Lovell released the controller, allowed his ships to drift, and turned to his crewmates with a questioning look. Swigert, still at sea in the alien LEM, once again shrugged. Haise, who knew the LEM better than any man on board, responded similarly. Lovell turned his palms upward.

“It’s not like we have any better ideas up here,” he said.

“Do you think 37 minutes is enough?” Haise asked.

“Actually, no,” Lovell answered. “Jack,” he now said back to the Capcom, “we’ll give it a try if that’s all we’ve got, but could you give us a little more time?”

“OK, Jim, we can figure out a maneuver for any time you want. You give us the time, we’ll shoot for it.”

“Then let’s shoot for an hour if we can.”

“OK how about 61 hours and 30 minutes?”

“Roger,” Lovell said. “But let’s talk back and forth till then and make sure we get this burn off right.”

“Roger,” Lousma said.

The hour until the free-return burn would be a frantic one for the crew. In a nominal mission, the flight plan allowed at least two hours for the so-called descent activation procedure, the ritual of configuring switches and setting circuit breakers that preceded any burn of the LEM’s lower-stage engine. The crew would now have barely half that time to do the same job, and do it without sacrificing the necessary precision. On top of that, there was still the elusive fine alignment to establish, something that, with all the space-craft’s wild movements, Lovell was not yet close to accomplishing. But while the hour would be a breathless one aboard the ship, on the ground it would provide a chance to draw a breath.

Kranz’s team was working on how to make the consumable resources last long enough to bring them home. Lovell:

“For the rest of this mission,” Kranz began, “I’m pulling you men off console. The people out in that room will be running the flight from moment to moment, but it’s the people in this room who will be coming up with the protocols they’re going to be executing. From now on, what I want from every one of you is simple – options, and plenty of them.”