James Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, Nasa’s most ‘successful failure’, passes into history

Years ago, on a family vacation in Florida, after we had exhausted the energy for enduring Florida’s famous theme parks and beach days even in mid-winter, I finally could pick what we would do next — and so we embarked on a day trip to a sacred place. Well, it was sacred to me, at least. 

By this, of course, I mean taking the tour of Cape Kennedy/Cape Canaveral. As a child in the early 1960s, I had been herded into a school auditorium, along with hundreds of other students, to watch the first historic American space launches, live on television — the two suborbital Mercury spacecraft flights of Alan B Shepard and Gus Grissom, and then John Glenn’s successful Earth orbital flight. 

Given the times and the impact of the Cold War on so many aspects of American life, watching those live, publicly broadcast launches was a kind of riposte to the Soviet manned rocket launches that had been carried out in secret and only announced after the cosmonauts had successfully returned to Earth. 

As a consequence, the Mercury astronauts could be touted as peaceful warriors on behalf of America in a space race with the Soviet Union. The texture of those days was beautifully captured by Tom Wolfe’s book, The Right Stuff, and the epic film made of it by writer-director Philip Kaufman.

For me, visiting Cape Kennedy was the fulfilment of a lifetime desire. I was, after all, one of those kids who had built a telescope, watched solar eclipses (safely) with that telescope, had tried to construct and launch a model rocket with friends, and who had even camped out on winter nights to record the paths of meteors in the sky in a science project to see if their apparent points of origin during meteor showers could be recorded using simple measuring tools and a star chart. Becoming an astronomer was a real thought — until I was ultimately defeated by the need to study calculus.

America’s space flight birthplace

At Cape Kennedy, the first stop on the bus tour was the command blockhouse for those first solo Mercury astronaut launches. Inside, it was an astonishingly simple setup. The dials and gauges looked like they were surplus parts from some World War 2 naval vessel or maybe a science hobbyist’s warehouse.

Even in the early days of cellphones, some 30 years ago, the tour guide explained that the mobile phone I had been carrying had more communications power than all the instruments of that blockhouse, let alone the capabilities of those graphing calculators just starting to be required for maths classes at our children’s school.

But for me, entering that building was akin to entering a place of worship. Or, at the very minimum, it was an extraordinary space for reflections about the nature of progress, the purposes of science, the deep human need for exploration, and even the very shape of the future. The rest of the tour took us to many of the other historic sites on the Cape Kennedy campus, but that blockhouse for the Mercury launches was the birthplace of America’s manned space flight programme. 

Gemini programme

In time, that space programme evolved so that by the time the Gemini programme and its two-man crews and larger spacecraft had begun, operational command was shifted to a massive new facility in Houston, Texas. 

With those flights, veteran Navy test pilot James Lovell had joined flights of the two-man Gemini craft, one of whose missions was to try out the actual techniques of docking one vehicle with another craft.

This would be critically important for the eventual Apollo launches, as those would have the command module continue to orbit the Moon while a two-man lunar exploration vehicle would head to the Moon’s surface and then return to that command module orbiting the Moon so that the three-man crew could return to Earth together. Accordingly, successful docking manoeuvres and skills were crucial for the future Moon missions.

James Lovell flew Gemini missions and then the Apollo 8 craft, which was launched on 21 December 1968. That ship, with its three-man crew, was the first manned space vehicle to fly beyond orbits around the Earth, instead travelling in space for unprecedented orbits around the Earth’s satellite. The voyage provided two apex moments. 

One was the unexpected moment when the crew of Apollo 8 began reading aloud on Christmas Eve — to all who were listening on Earth — from the opening lines of the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The space flight was memorable, but it could also be humbling.

‘Earthrise’

But there was an additional outcome of that journey, well beyond the testing of the vehicles to be used for the actual landing on the Moon with Apollo 9. That, of course, was those extraordinary photographs of the Earth as seen from the Moon, famously dubbed “Earthrise”.

This image gave a kickstart to the nascent, global environmental movement through this perfect depiction of Earth as a small — and likely frail and endangered — sphere, floating in space; saying to us all, in effect, there was no Plan B if we mess up.

Perhaps all of this should have been sufficient excitement for any one person. But there was yet more to come for James Lovell. He was named as commander of the Apollo 13 mission that was designated to reach the Fra Mauro highlands to carry out really quick geological survey work and collect samples for further, more thorough analysis back home on Earth.

Crisis

But instead, the Apollo 13 mission that began on 11 April 1970 tested the capabilities of Nasa to deal with an unexpected life-threatening crisis — as well as the human crew’s ability to respond successfully to that crisis even as they were in space.

At first, all seemed normal. They had already left Earth’s orbit and were on their way to the Moon. They had achieved separation of the command module from the booster rocket sections, and they had carried out the reversal of the positioning of the command module and the lunar lander to make ready for their journey to the Moon.

Then there was an explosion inside one of the oxygen tanks that fed the fuel cells and provided vital oxygen to the crew in the command module, creating a nearly instantaneous, major crisis for the mission. (The cause of the explosion was a short circuit in the wiring of the tank’s stirring paddles that had been poorly insulated during construction.) Electricity from the fuel cells and the continuing supply of oxygen were crucial for the survival of the crew, as was the capture of carbon dioxide exhaled by that crew.

With Apollo 13’s message to its flight controllers, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” it quickly became clear that the only hope was for the three astronauts to move immediately into the lunar module as their lifeboat, despite it having been designed for only two crew members. 

Crucially, its oxygen supply was barely adequate, the electrical system’s drain on its batteries was exceeding capabilities, meaning they were unable to heat the craft properly, and most threateningly, the capacity of its carbon dioxide scrubbers in their improvised lifeboat was inadequate for the task of absorbing that gas from three men’s respiration.

Crucial challenges — ‘work the problem’

The first decision was whether to attempt to bring the crew back immediately via an entirely unanticipated path, or to swing around the Moon and use the lunar gravity to serve as a slingshot, propelling the wounded craft back to Earth. 

The decision was made to follow the latter course, but then the carbon dioxide challenge became ever more threatening. The filters of the carbon dioxide scrubbers in the lunar module and the command module were not mutually interchangeable, resulting in an urgent need to figure out — literally — how to make a square peg fit a round hole. 

Enter, now, the dogged energies of another man, Ed Smylie, who too has recently died, on 25 April. This engineer and his team wrestled with how to resolve the life-threatening situation with just the resources in the craft and then to create a procedure the astronauts could follow before their air became unbreathable.

In the Ron Howard film, Apollo 13, a rather truthful version of the actual events, there is that wonderful moment when Smylie and his team confront a workbench covered with the random detritus of what was available in the spacecraft that might conceivably be repurposed to solve this life and death puzzle, or, in the words of flight director Gene Kranz, to “work the problem”. 

‘Steely-eyed rocket man’

This they did, using the cardboard covers from flight procedures manuals, space suit hoses, rubbish bags and what Nasa identified as grey tape on the spacecraft manifest. Of course, we all know that stuff is the omni-useful product, duct tape, the adhesive tape that holds anything and everything together and can be found in any hardware store.

From his peers, rather than simply being one more flight engineer, Smylie earned the highly valued sobriquet of being “a steely-eyed rocket man”. That is a phrase whose lineage traces back to those taciturn air force officers assigned to underground bunkers who hold the keys and launch codes to fire nuclear missiles at an enemy bent on destroying their country.

It seems appropriate, somehow, that Smylie and Lovell both have recently died, only a few months apart. Both proved to be unflappable in the face of what easily could have led to a globally followed, real-time disaster in space, rather than the “successful failure” Apollo 13 became known for after the three astronauts returned home, even as a lunar landing became impossible.

Lovell never made it back into space again, and his memoirs were rather wistfully entitled Lost Moon. Both he and Smylie eventually retired from Nasa and moved to various private sector efforts. Lovell became a popular public speaker and was sometimes a warmly greeted guest on late-night television shows. And, of course, the entire adventure has been told in the film, Apollo 13.

In the years thereafter, the Apollo missions ended, the Space Shuttle vehicle was put into operation instead, along with the International Space Station, but no manned craft has again attempted a landing on the Moon. The dangers of space exploration remained apparent, most especially with the catastrophic disaster of the Challenger shuttle craft on 28 January 1986. 

Meanwhile, continuing advances in automated technology such as the James Webb Space Telescope, the highly successful landings on Mars, and the flybys of the outer planets have led some to question the very purpose — and the cost — of manned space flight. Is it just a vanity project, or does human participation add enough value to the missions to outweigh that cost and risk?

Nevertheless, there is, once again, a growing push to return humans to the Moon and even on to Mars, especially if Elon Musk’s plans for a human Plan B take hold.

Perhaps, too, the human spirit of adventure will make such efforts inevitable, despite those risks and costs. Some of us space exploration enthusiasts certainly hope so. DM