Tom Hunter: Thank you making the fix. No apologies required, as it was simply a mistake, as I said.

And thank you for plugging my work. Much appreciated.

GAAK. Fixed and apologies. A technical glitch where I did not apply the WordPress “quote” format to those two and missed it because I used the same background colour!!!

Thanks for reminding me of his early interest in rocketry.

(Farewell, Jim…)

Tom Hunter: I appreciate you quoting me, as well as recommending my work. However, there are two paragraphs in your own obituary that are quotes of mine that are NOT in quotes, making it appear as if you wrote them.

I am sure this is an error. Could you fix please?

Either way, thank you for your kind words.

You are correct. Jim and Marilyn Lovell are among the very few people not to have been subject to the usual rule about screen portrayals of real people – that you are always played by someone better-looking than you actually are. Tom Hanks was not better-looking than Jim Lovell and Kathleen Quinlan – who is, it should be noted, a genuinely splendid-looking woman – was still not better-looking than Marilyn Lovell.

It is hard to say what would have happened if history had gone differently, but three Apollo missions were cancelled largely due to fear that another Apollo 13 incident would end more tragically.

Tom Paine cancelled Apollo 20 in early 1970 to free up its Saturn V for launching the Skylab space station. But yeah, Paine would go on to cancel Apollo 15 and 19 in September, 1970 for reasons of both safety and cost,

They didn’t save much money by cancelling those two missions – the hardware was already paid for and mostly built – but the risks were real enough. Every Apollo mission was like playing Russian Roulette.

What if the mission was successful and the explosion happened on the way home?

The LM is jettisoned in lunar orbit. So they’d be dead.

Having the LM available as a “lifeboat” is what saved them.

fairly good summary

I second Robert’s recommendation: You may enjoy Jim Lovell’s book Lost Moon (hardback edition) or Apollo 13 (soft back, printed after the movie).

During the Apollo 13 incident, I had no idea how much trouble that they were in. It wasn’t until I read about the mission that I realized that they survived despite not having a snowball’s chance in hell. The problems were many, the solution were difficult.

“Could the explosion had been stronger?”

Not really. The oxygen tank failed at a flange, so it failed at a specific pressure. If the flange had been made stronger, then there may have been a larger thud, and at some strength of the flange then the part that flew off may have been able to punch through enough material to damage the heat shield. Since they didn’t know what went wrong, they didn’t know whether it had damaged the heat shield on the Command Module.

“What if the explosion had happened sooner or later in the mission?”

I agree with Richard M.

Power would also have been a bigger problem, if it had happened sooner. They may have had 30 hours of oxygen after jettisoning the lunar module, but they were short on energy remaining in the batteries aboard the Command Module.

“Grok says the same fuel tank had been used on Apollo 10.”

The Service Modules were destroyed during reentry, so none of the Service Module hardware flown on one flight could be used on another. My recollection is similar to Diane Wilson’s.

Ironically, Lovell had been part of the incident investigation team and had agreed that the tank was satisfactory to use. It probably was, at that point. Dropping the tank did not directly result in the explosion, but an overheating incident during subsequent testing caused damage to the wiring insulation. The problem was that no one realized that there had been overheating until the investigation into the burst oxygen tank.

“The short circuit which caused the explosion could have occurred on previous flights?”

The short circuit occurred due to damage done to the oxygen tank prior to assembly into the Service Module. The damage to the wiring happened later, and no one realized that they had caused any wiring damage, so there was not an investigation into that incident. Lovell’s book goes into detail on how this happened.

My recollection from the book is that after a later test, they had difficulty draining the dropped tank, so the workaround was to use the heater within the tank to vaporize the liquid O2 so that it would exit the tank in a more timely fashion. The technician performing the task was instructed to not let the temperature exceed some temperature. Unfortunately, that temperature was the limit that the readout would display, so when the temperature stopped increasing, he did not have any reason to turn off the heater. How hot the interior of the tank actually got is unknown, but we can be sure that it was at least the melting temperature of the insulation.

“If the crew and mission control were not so knowledgeable and skilled, were there critical points where steps had to be done exactly right to get back to Earth?”

Familiarity with the spacecraft was crucial to figuring out the many workarounds. In the movie Apollo 13, one of the engineers summed up the entire set of problems to be solved when he said, “We gotta find a way to make this fit into the hole for this, using nothing but that.”

“It would have seriously traumatized the country if the ship had not been able to return to Earth.”

It is hard to say what would have happened if history had gone differently, but three Apollo missions were cancelled largely due to fear that another Apollo 13 incident would end more tragically. Budget was another major factor, because Apollo was expensive. In fact, President Johnson was almost willing to cancel Apollo before the Moon landing, but because Kennedy was assassinated, Apollo became the thing America was doing to honor his memory. Many people (Sen. Mondale, for instance) thought that we could end poverty if only we gave the poor the money we spent on Apollo. When we did give the poor a lot of money, then we only ended up with more poor people who now expect free money. They even believe that they are entitled to what they now call “entitlements.”

I think that we honor our astronauts by commercializing space, bringing us the benefits that they had done all that exploration to bring to us, benefits that we had expected to receive ever since the 1950s.

What if the explosion had happened sooner or later in the mission?

It would depend on just what point we’re talking about, but….obviously, if it happens at any point when the Lunar Module is not attached to Odyssey, they’d all be dead.

Likewise, if it happens at *any* point in lunar orbit, they would have been in deep doo-doo, since that would require the SPS engine to fire for insertion back into Trans-Earth Injection, and they were terrified of even trying to fire the SPS given the damage sustained to the SM by the explosion. They would have had no choice but to try it anyway, of course, since the alternative was certain death (the LM engines did not have sufficient delta-v), but … we really don’t know what would have happened, since we’ve never had the SM available for inspection.

On the other hand, had the explosion occurred *earlier* in the mission….not a problem if they are still in Earth orbit, since they could have just done a prompt reentry if necessary. But if it occurs after the TLI burn….I believe that when they ejected the LM right before reentry, they had about 30 or so hours of oxygen left at the levels they were using, so….if true, do the math. (I am unclear on when the CO2 scrubbers would finally have run out, so that would bear checking on, too.)

Apollo was a heck of a risky program, with numerous close calls. This kind of exercise reminds us of the risks NASA took to pull the program off — and what an amazing achievement it was.

Lovell had the courage to push the limits of human exploration, even though he knew he would be doing it in a tiny and very fragile spacecraft using technology that humans had barely yet invented. May we all have the courage and vision as he did to make his life achievement merely the first chapter in the human effort to explore and settle the solar system.

Well said, Bob.

Ad astra, and R.I.P., Mr. Lovell.

Popcorn in Bed with Cassie
“Apollo 13” (1995)
First Time Watching Reaction
https://youtu.be/pkWZ5CabUS8
37:48

Frank Borman is still my favorite.

He could have watched Cthulhu rise from the depths and not flinched.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Borman#/media/File:NF-104.jpg

The tank had originally been installed in the Apollo 10 service module, but the entire bank of oxygen tanks was removed due to an unrelated problem, and a different set of oxygen tanks was installed. During disassembly, the tank was dropped a few inches, which may or may not have been the cause of the fire.

I ended up giving that presentation twice, once during the lockdowns on a video chat, and once in a coffee shop where Fred Haise went to college. It was on his birthday, he was not aware that I knew that, so I had arranged a Q&A session afterward, and when he called in, the audience, staff and customers sang “Happy Birthday” to him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7cX0Q_sEpk

Steve Richter: The movie Apollo 13 is reasonably accurate, for a movie. Lovell rejected the first script Ron Howard gave him. He then handed Howard the voice transcripts from the mission to use as a basis.

It is a movie of course, so some liberties with reality were taken. If you want a more detailed look, read “Lost Moon,” the book that Howard optioned for the rights.