“We cut those margins pretty dad-gum close.” In the end, Pohl says his propellant almost froze- only 2˚ Fahrenheit from disaster. They would be close enough to see the welcoming Pacific Ocean from space but unable to maneuver for re-entry, either burning up or bouncing off the atmosphere and sailing helplessly away. If the propellants froze, it wouldn’t matter how much electrical power the astronauts had at their disposal. how cold the were going to get, and I gave myself four degrees above freezing on it,” he said, recalling his small margin for error. Pohl oversaw the command module’s little thruster rockets. “To do that, you’ve got to turn every heater off that you don’t absolutely have to have.” The spacecraft was going to get very cold, and shivering astronauts were just one of many worries. “We had to cut our energy consumption in half in order to make it back home,” engineer Henry Pohl recalled. Working backward from that goal, to every minute of the return path, they ruthlessly budgeted the mission’s electricity.
They would need enough juice to safely guide the crew capsule into Earth’s atmosphere. They knew how much they would need, with luck, in the mission’s last minutes. With the spacecraft’s fuel cells mostly useless now – just like astronauts, they required oxygen to run – the engineers had to conserve every bit of electrical power. Scores of engineers started their calculations. Nobody said a word to the guy on the left or the guy on the right. “There might have been two hundred of us turning our cars off and walking in at the same pace. … We’d all gotten called in-all three shifts.” They efficiently filled the parking lot outside Mission Control. “All of a sudden, it was about midnight, it was just a line of cars with their lights on. Aldo Bordano, in his early twenties, remembers the commute. “You really need to understand that the is dying.”Īs word spread through the ranks, everyone who could possibly help swarmed to the center. “You guys are wasting your time,” he said. Thinking back on it, he saw his distance from the Control Center as good fortune – he could see the entire forest of information. “That’s not an instrumentation problem,” he told them. Aaron asked to hear the numbers from various instruments, one at a time, over the phone. Aldridge told him they were facing an instrument problem or “flaky readouts”-there was no way data this extreme could be real – they couldn’t lose the mission’s stored oxygen so quickly. He made a phone call to an especially insightful young engineer, John Aaron.Īaron recalled being at home, winding down after a long shift at Mission Control. “First of all, we thought we’d boil it down to something simple and obvious,” engineer Arnold Aldridge recalled later. It looked like they were rapidly losing their oxygen supply. Engineers tried to sift through reams of odd data coming about the Apollo 13 spacecraft, from instrument readings to the confused reports from three astronauts. Late on 13 April 1970, the night shift had started in Houston’s Manned Spaceflight Center.
0 kommentar(er)
