Tom Hanks' movie about the incredible success story that was the recovery of the Apollo 13 crew, was great. It's one of those movies that I hate to see when I'm flipping, because I'll compulsively click on it, and then I'm immersed, once again, in a movie I've seen a bzillion times already. Astronauts, engineers; thrown into a frenzy of innovation and desperation; in the end, exemplifying the very best in us.
It's been 45 years, and I still fervently believe that the accomplishment of that team stands unsurpassed, head and shoulders above any other achievement where technology and humanity have intersected, before or since.
Why I view Apollo 13 with reverence, links to superb and fresh accounts, with some snippets; to be discovered as we re-enter the dKos atmosphere, descending through the fluffy orange cloud. {hope the 'chutes deploy, or we're crash landin' in the Comments...}
Unfortunately, in Hanks' movie, the in-cockpit drama was necessarily concocted for box office purposes. The real drama was simply too technical, and too difficult for the writers to connect with the audience to be cinematically effective. The "Here's a bunch of junk, MacGyver me CO2 scrubber", and the "Dude, srsly. Take the Keurig out of the start-up sequence. It's pulling way too many amps..." bits had to suffice; because who gave who the clap was way more engaging to future "Honey Boo Boo" fans.
Below I've linked to two superb articles, each of which provides more detail and first person accounts of the real drama behind the achievements of the team that saved the crew of Apollo 13. If you'd rather skip me; scroll down to the links, fire up that current-sucking Keurig, get comfortable, and jump off to the articles. They're long and detailed (SM cutaways showing the liquid O2 and H2 tanks and the fuel cells, explanations of the electrical circuitry connecting the CM to the LM and the obstacles posed by the original design, diagrams detailing the internal design of the O2 tank that exploded, and the subsequent redesign, et al). The back story and first person accounts are riveting, and I found the engineering details captivating.
I followed the Apollo program attentively when I was a child. (I wrote to NASA and got some cool color prints of stuff, which I’m sure I still have somewhere.) I saw the news on tv when Apollo 1 caught fire on the launch pad, incinerating the crew inside the command module. (I was too young at that point to understand what was going on.) When Armstrong and Aldrin were walking on the moon, I was watching on tv, and then I went out to the back yard and stared up at the moon. Unbelievable. I had previously tried to explain to my parents that, no, the Lunar Module was not going to sink in to green cheese, yadda, yadda.
So Apollo 13 was a big deal to me.
When Hanks' movie came out, it rekindled my childhood fascination; but what it really did was engender a much higher degree of respect for the team on the ground. Every time I watch it I'm overwhelmed with just how freakin’ squared away all those people were. The depth of knowledge and focus and innovation that was demonstrated while saving the Apollo 13 crew was monumental.
The Apollo 11 moon landing wasn’t the greatest achievement of the space program. Saving Apollo 13 was.
Reading the two pieces I cite below tells me that whatever respect I had for these guys from childhood memories and from the movie doesn’t even come close to what they actually deserve. The details of what they had to handle, with the limited technology available to them, define to me the peak of human “squared-away-ness”. I can’t come up with any other event in history where a group of people had to accomplish something this technologically complicated under such severely limiting time, physics, hardware, and software constraints.
This wasn’t “effort”, or “bravery”, like running into the towers on 9/11 to save people. No one in Mission Control was in any danger. This wasn’t a personal physical achievement on the ground. It was all remote control; an achievement of human dedication and intellect. It was decades of accumulated knowledge, tens of thousands of hours spent developing contingency checklists to cover any possible event or process that they could dream up, years of rehearsing and refining their procedures, and individuals becoming experts on each component, no matter how small or minimally consequential, that made up each system on each of the four major modules that made up the spacecraft itself, and becoming experts on how all of those systems integrated with one another.
The pieces, parts, and integration of those systems were their lives.
These were experts whose knowledge went “down to the metal”, as it were, and their collective expertise was first put to the test trying to figure out what went wrong. They had absolutely no idea what had happened. The astronauts heard a bang, the controllers saw their consoles light up with warnings, and none of it made any sense. Even in the initial confusion, decisions had to be made rapidly or all would have been lost. Once they figured out what had happened and what they thought might be damaged, they had to devise entirely new arrangements of the functioning systems, and use them to keep the astronauts alive and to navigate them back to a safe re-entry.
I would say that, in terms of the integration of humanity and technology, this feat was our high-point as a species:
The process of so many experts working together to configure an entirely new system from disparate pieces of old systems, ad hoc, within excruciatingly immutable physical, technological and time constraints; thus enabling the scrupulously trained, exceptionally disciplined operators of that system to successfully maneuver it through harrowingly narrow windows of survivability. |
If we just take a moment and think of all of the human effort it took, from the beginning of man’s use of a rock to kill something; and consider how much brain power and learning, experimentation and exploration occurred over all those generations, to get this particular group of men to such a level of knowledge, expertise, and creativity; and then add to that the sense of duty, dedication, and focus that these experts brought into that one circumstance; to me this is awe-inspiring.
We celebrate myriad events, and laud many achievements.
For anyone who reveres humanity’s relationship with technology;
The anniversary of the flight of Apollo 13 should become a holy week.
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The ArsTechnica article; "45 years after Apollo 13: Ars looks at what went wrong and why".
"The only thing I did was not get up and run off!"
The IEEE Spectrum article; "Apollo 13, We Have a Solution." (part one)
The problems were piling up at Liebergot's door. Although his voice is impressively calm throughout the recordings of the voice loops from mission control, Liebergot admits that he was almost overwhelmed when he realized "it was not an instrumentation problem but some kind of a monster systems failure that I couldn't sort out...It was probably the most stressful time in my life. There was a point where panic almost overcame me.
and this:
Over the last 35 years, the incredible efforts of the lunar module flight controllers have been somewhat overlooked, ironically because the Aquarius performed so well. It did everything asked of it, whether designed to or not. So the attention has focused on the titanic struggle over the crippled Odyssey. But without the lunar module controllers' dedication, foresight, and years of work, Lovell, Haise, and Swigert wouldn't have had a chance.
"Apollo 13, We Have a Solution." (part two)
The incident cemented Aaron's reputation as a "steely-eyed missile man."
"Apollo 13, We Have a Solution." (part three)
But the astronaut's last words before re-entry were not for themselves. They were for mission control. "I know all of us here want to thank all of you guys down there for the very fine job you did," Swigert transmitted. "That's affirm," chimed in Lovell.
A few seconds later, the Odyssey disappeared into a sea of radio static.
and this:
Bostick, the trajectory specialist, was in hell. "It was probably the worst I ever felt in my life," he told Spectrum. "My feeling was 'oh my god, we have done the impossible: we got them all the way home...and now something goes wrong in entry?...It was one of the most depressing [times] of my life..." Bostick's voice wavers for a moment, the memory still emotionally charged after thirty-five years. Then his voice strengthens into triumph, "but then, when we heard from them, it was the happiest moment of my life," he declares.
and this:
Kraft was one of the few not swept away by the sight of the Odyssey gently descending into the Pacific, suspending his celebration until the crew was safely onboard the Iwo Jima. On seeing the deployed parachutes, "I felt fine," he remembers, "but I felt a lot better when I saw them walking on the deck of the carrier. That's the way I always was. Too many things could happen between the parachutes and the deck." Thirty-five years later, Kraft ponders the memory of the crew walking in the open air on the Iwo Jima. "That was one of the most excellent things I've ever seen," he finally says.
Yes, it was.