So he came back. Now, you have to realize that al shepard was the ultimate politician. Very well respected, first flight he did, so he talked nasa into giving him talked them into giving him the very next flight, which was apollo 13. After he started working 13 and i was getting my crew together for 14, i think that the nasa hierarchy had second thoughts. They said, look, al has been grounded for eight or nine years, and youre going to give him the very next flight . He only made a 15 minute suborbital flight . Lets get serious about this thing. So deke said, okay, ill slip him one. So one day when i was training for 14, deke came in and said, jim, how would you like to take 13 and well give shepard 14 . I was delighted. I said, yes. I mean, you know, i was backup on 11. And im all set to go. I mean, you know, i need the training, i need to know the experiments and things like that. But im ready. So thats how it came to pass. Can you put to bed or add to the story that one hears that you guys would kill your grandmother to get a flight and there was a great deal of heavy competition between all of you for those jobs . Mr. Lovell i can put to bed the fact that it was aggressive, but it wasnt that aggressive. The people that really controlled it was deke slayton. He was the person he put in suggestions up to chris kraft or bob gilruth at the time. Unless there was some real reason why not, not to make a change, i think that stood. If you look at the rotation, pretty much we were in a rotational mode. I was originally on apollo 11. Mike was on apollo 8, then i was backup on apollo 8, then going to 11. It was just a rotationary period with new people feeding in. Deke really held the whole ball of wax as far as selection goes, i think. But there was competition. People were disappointed that they couldnt get on. So many people thought that they should and other people, you know, had too many maybe. So the commander is bumped from 13 and you take over . Mr. Lovell yes. And another member of the crew at the last minute is bumped, and somebody else comes in . Mr. Lovell well, yes. Just four days before we were to take off on apollo 13, the doctors discovered, what charlie duke came down with the measles, he was the backup lunar apollo. He came down with the measles. And so, he had been working with us and all of a sudden the doctors said, oh, gosh, these guys have been exposed to the measles and they will come down with the measles about the time they are orbiting the moon. It will be a disaster. They went in and looked at our bloodwork before we knew anything about this. They found out the indications were that hayes and i had measles when we were kids and i and our kids had the measles, so we were immune. But kent was a bachelor. Never had been married, never had a kid and never had measles. They bumped ken and put jack on board, who was his backup. Very unfortunately, the movie shows you a little bit different. Let me give you the reality. Jack happened to have written the malfunction procedures for the command module. So he knew the command module pretty good. It is true, he had not trained for the last month and a half because normally the backup crew at that stage are the gophers. They get the hotel rooms for the guests, they do this, they do that. After we we trained for about two days with jack, mainly to say because when we were by ourselves, when he was by himself and we were coming up to rendezvous and all of that, we knew how each other would act and everything because training was for a long period of time, even the inflection in kens voice coming up, how he was doing things but jack proved to be a very, very competent pilot. Didnt it worry you when mattingly was scrubbed and jack goes in . Mr. Lovell oh, yeah. It had to scare you to death . Mr. Lovell yeah, because when mattingly was scrubbed and jack hadnt been part of the team, we thought, you know, because we had worked so closely together as a team, but we had already slipped the flight once from march to april. And the two days he worked with jack, he appeared perfectly comfortable with the vehicle. And so i said go. Because they came to me privately and said, are you happy . Are you satisfied . I said, sure. Did you just want to go or were you happy and satisfied . Mr. Lovell oh, i was happy and satisfied that we were going to go. Normally, on the first two flights to the moon, they tell the crew privately, look it, if anything goes wrong, dont worry about it, come back, well give you the very next flight. That was apollo 11. Apollo 12, dont worry about it, dont take a chance, well give you the very next flight. They didnt say anything on apollo 13. [laughter] obviously, youre not superstitious . Mr. Lovell no, im not superstitious now and i wasnt then, although the coincidence the 13th hour of the 13th minute, apollo 13. Mr. Lovell takes off and explodes on the 13th. Yes. Mr. Lovell an interesting sideline. Apollo 13 was the last spacecraft, to my knowledge, that ever had the number 13. If you look at the history of all the follow up spacecraft, all the shuttles and orbiters, they were like 41g, 53l or Something Like that. There is no 13. Nasa will claim that they are absolutely not superstitious, but i bet you to my last dollar they will never name another spacecraft 13. The launch was perfect. Everything went well. Mr. Lovell saturn 5 worked fine until the second stage. Whats happening here . Mr. Lovell then the Center Engine of our second stage of our vehicle shut down two minutes early. Probably due to a high vibration which, we have a safety feature to shut it off. For a while we thought, boy, is there a crisis . Is there a problem with this thing . Do we have enough fuel, do we have enough power to get into earth orbit and kick ourselves around to go all the way to the moon . Very fortunately, the folks in huntsville overbuilt the vehicle. We did. We had enough fuel. It took us about an extra minute and a half to get into earth orbit, but we still had enough fuel on the third stage to go all the way to the moon. But the crisis is over, no problem. Mr. Lovell yeah, we thought that was the crisis because almost every flight, even today probably, has something to happen. Something doesnt work. Instrument fails. Something goes wrong, and we thought, i told the guy, thats our crisis, look, we got rid of it, were on our way. So youre out how long before the accident happens . Mr. Lovell were out two days before the accident happens, about 30 hours after we took off, we got onto a different course because the course we were on originally was called a free return course to allow us to get back to earth. About 30 hours, we change course to land at this place, we were going to land at a place where the sunlight would be in the proper position to see the shadows. And then two days out, on this hybrid course, the explosion occurs. Youre just getting ready to go to sleep, am i right . Mr. Lovell yep. We were just finishing a tv program. That was the last thing that evening. I think it was either 9 00 or 10 00 back here in houston. And im coming back down through the tunnel, and suddenly there is a huge bang and the spacecraft rocks back and forth, the lights come on, jets fire, and i looked at hayes to see if he knew what caused it, he had no idea. I looked at jack, he didnt know. And then of course, things started happening. What started you happen . What started to happen . Mr. Lovell it went and sequenced the lights came on. We eventually lost two fuel cells. Couldnt get them back. Then we saw our oxygen being depleted. One tank was completely gone, the other tank started to go down. Then i looked out the window and we saw gas escaping from the rear of the spacecraft. You didnt see that now, for about according to the , record, for 14 minutes before you saw the gas coming out . Mr. Lovell oh, yeah, yeah. Let me go back. Mr. Lovell okay. I dont have time to see the gas yet. You just blew up, you dont know whats going on. Mr. Lovell have no idea. And you say, houston, we have a problem. Mr. Lovell yeah. Okay. And what did houston say . Mr. Lovell well, first of all, it was jack that said, houston weve got a problem. And houston said, say again, please . I say, houston, weve got a problem. We have a main b bus that was a case of the electrical system. About that time, hayes yelled down, he said, you know, during training, we had a problem with one of those fuel cells, this might be our big problem, its an electrical problem. So we looked at the fuel cells, we were looking to see, and pretty soon, they got back online and all of a sudden they died again. And then, one time, the oxygen tank gauge went full high, then it went full down. And we didnt know, is that an instrument problem . Because obviously we couldnt lose all the oxygen. This went back and forth. And another thing we tried to do, we didnt know if something hit us. The first thing we really did was, tried to put the hatch back between the lunar module and the command module because we noticed the command module was ok, but if the lunar module got a hit, we would slowly lose all the oxygen in the spacecraft. I said, close the hatch. Jack clyde jack tried to close it, he couldnt do it. So i tried, i couldnt do it. I said, forget it, secure it to a couch, if the lunar module was hit, we would be dead by now anyway. That started the sequence. We went to look at the instruments and things deteriorated. He looked at the gauges and out the window. You look out the window, you see something. Then you know. Did you know what that was . Mr. Lovell it did not take much to realize. The second and lasting for one and the same and shortly we would be out of oxygen. At this point, what did you do . Mr. Lovell we were trying to figure out how much time we had. We have enough time . Is this a gauge problem . We are talking to the ground. Time, i think we are lurching losing the third fee will sell. If we were going to lose the oxygen, we were going to lose a few will sell. About that time, we with icam out we were thinking about the lunar module, maybe we ought to try to use it, get back in there to protect ourselves because it has oxygen inside. Have you thought of it as a lifeboat . Iovell i never bid never did. There had been worked on in some of the previous simulations of using it but basically using it as an Emergency Vehicle around the moon in case something happened in the command module. Say the engine fired too much or did not fire and up and your strain that we are some strange orbit above the moon, we use the module to straighten things up. We never thought about using the lunar module for a four day mission to get back to the earth. The lunar module was built to last 45 hours. He was built to support two people. Here we are, you hundred thousand miles from earth. 240,000 miles from earth. You i know what your answer is, but i have to ask. Do you think you were going to be a perpetual monument to the space program, the three of you floating around out there . Mr. Lovell the thought crossed our minds that we were in trouble. But we never dwelled on it. Up and said, what is going to happen if we dont get back . Where are we going to be . My thoughts were this. If everything failed and we still had life support in the lunar module but we could not get back to the earth, the heatshield was damaged, because the orbit we are on would take us past the earth. Said, we000 miles i will send back information, we will keep operating as long as we can. Thats the end of the deal. Do inas what i planned to my mind, should something happen. People often ask about this poison pill, its ridiculous. Tell me about that. You did not have anything to kill yourself with . Mr. Lovell all we had to do is throw open the cabin. We could go out like that. Why bother carrying poison pills . Did the three of you have any conversation about the fact mr. Lovell we never did. We never admit to ourselves that we are not going to make it. Only one time, fred looked at after the lunar module, found out we had 45 hours worth of power and we were 90 hours from home, he says Something Like, i dont think we are going to make it the way we are right now. I said, i agree, what we are doing now is not going to hack it. How did the ground sound at that time . , welovell they started up said every thing we could when we had the exposure, this is after we saw the oxygen. They said, we have a lot of guys working on it down here, we will help you out. Thanks a lot. [laughter] that is when they started getting betty work together. Let me check off some things that i would think about. Oxygen, did you have enough out in . Mr. Lovell we did not have enough any in the maintain. We did have any lunar module oxygen plus the fact we had oxygen in the backpacks. Use, we are not going to so we can tap into that. So we can breathe . Mr. Lovell we can breathe. Electricity . Mr. Lovell power, use batteries, good for 45 hours, that was the normal use of the electricity. Water . Mr. Lovell water was important not just to drink but we had to cool our electronics systems. Water was critical, more so than the oxygen. Later, we turned off the electrical quit anyway. You almost dehydrated. Because of anah, edict i put out, reducing the water intake to make sure we had water for our systems. I probably went overboard on that and we probably could have used more water. Food . Mr. Lovell did not think about it. Did not think about food. Four days, youve got to think about mr. Lovell we grab something, whatever it was, whose ever it was, we ate it. The hotdogs, the movie was correct, the hotdogs refrozen. Get water out to of the command module. Put in orange respects or some thing like that before it froze in orange juice bags or Something Like that before it froze. How uncomfortable was it . Mr. Lovell cold and clammy. It was sort of clammy, very cold, temperatures kept dropping because we would normally keep the temperature normal by balancing the heat load from the electrical system. People often ask, i thought about it, should we put on our space suits . Then i thought, they had been bulky with three of us, it the lunar module was only built for two people. Not room enough. Rubberized, if we started to perspire and it is cold outside, that would not be good anyway. On, or jack did not have any. The watereak in system at b. Water in there. Place,inside of the there is moisture all over everything. The last place you want to see moisture collect. Mr. Lovell especially in the command module, which was dark, clammy, not even body heat. Bigbox the jerryrigged box for the lithium hydroxide, everybody talks about that. Tell me the truth about that. Mr. Lovell the truth is, what you saw in the movie is pretty much the truth. What happened was, in the lunar module, we did not think about it at the time, but some people did, that the round canisters were developed to support two people for two days. They were around and they were lithium hydroxide. They were becoming saturated and the partial pressure of Carbon Dioxide was rising, something that we did not notice at first. To figure outrted what they could do. In the dead command module, they use square canisters. Had plenty of them, but you cannot put a square canister in the round hole of the lunar module system. Big engineering goof, why we had a square there, we had around over there, we will never know. With wassystem came up how to jerryrigged a square canister to work in the lunar module, we did with tape, plastic, cardboard, and an old sock, and it worked. Did they call up and say, take a piece of tape out . Mr. Lovell first, they said, take a piece of duct tape about three feet. Thats what we did. User, or what . Mr. Lovell jack and i started to build this thing. According to the instructions, the instructions were explicit, it was a great job. If you look at the one that the crew system had to show the people in the control center, you look at the one hanging on the lunar module wall, they are identical. Of youthis time, all must have serious sleep deprivation problems. Youve got to be just tired. Mr. Lovell actual sleep was limited. Maybe i had one hour. We try to stay up in the command module. A funny phenomenon, if you go and the command module and when else was allowed no one else was around, your body heat heat up the air next to you because in zero gravity there is no convection so hot air does not rise so it does not begin cold air. Your body is like a blanket. It works to a little degree. We found out that sleep is something that you could get a few weights of and be relaxed again. On duty, i put my fingers like this and close my eyes and maybe fall asleep for a minute or two and be ok again. Naps at a time. Did you sleep at once . Mr. Lovell somebody stayed on duty. We cap somebody awake. Usually it was fed by himself and jack and i tried to get sleep. We get to the point where things are as under control as they are going to get but youve got to figure out something to see so you know when to fire your thrusters. Aree is a telescope, you supposed to fire with it, is that right . Mr. Lovell there are two things about the telescope. When we are going to come around and make a second burn, i speed up burn to come home, we are ,orried that i made a mistake of transferring the angle data from the command modules Guidance System properly into the lunar module system. We had to have that Guidance System in the lunar module to get the proper altitude to make the proper speed up burn. The ground determined a method of trying to see if that data was good. Stars, allt see any the debris was around the spacecraft. There was no way of seeing stars to do the normal navigation. But the sun is a star. Computer, the the Guidance System, to point the telescope at the sun, which is a star. That the, then we knew information was correct on the computer. Thats what we did, we put it in, we let the spacecraft jog around and point the telescope. If you hear our conversations, it is a little bit like my fair lady. Shes got it, i think shes got it, i think yeah, shes got yep, there it is. That was the first thing. We knew the guidance was located for that long burn. We made that long burn at every thing was fine. After that, we shut every thing down because we had to save electrical power. Is this the fast bird you are talking about . Mr. Lovell 4. 5 minutes. Ground had been tracking us by this time. Back onught we got the free return curse free return course. Tabulateded us, it our course back to the earth and found out we were going to miss the earth, we are no longer on the free return course. What can we do . Every thing was shut down. You dont have that Guidance System. We dont have anything. Theywhen they said gave us procedures about using the earth, i said, i do those procedures because we had them developed in apollo 8. When i was doing navigation stuff, we developed those procedures, but we took that after our flight manuals because we never thought they would be used. The ground said, we thought you would never those procedures. Iybe it was appropriate that was on apollo 8, we used the earth as a guiding post and be burned to get back at the proper angle to get back home again. Knowu are coming down, you you have made it, but you are not sure whether anything is going to work. You know the parachute is going to come out, do you know anything is going to work . Mr. Lovell those are important. When we jettisoned the Service Module and it floated on by, we saw this gaping hole, this panel blown out. That worried us that our heatshield was damaged because it was next to our heatshield. There is nothing we can do about that. Weare aimed for the earth, are coming into the earth, we are going to burn up, then of course, the ground did not know what happened, the last crisis where those parachutes because the pyrotechnics to put up those shoots, which we normally keep warm with electrical power, were called for four days. We did not know if they were going to fire. If they did not, we would hit the water pretty fast. But they fired. Mr. Lovell they fired, we came down. At that point, you are home free . Mr. Lovell i knew i was home free. We saw water on the windows and the thing did not sink. Up to that point . Im looking for the most frightening point of this whole thing. When it exploded . When you realize you had a problem . When you were coming down, wondering whether that parachute is going to deploy . Mr. Lovell the most frightening went is when the explosion occurred, and after a period of time, oxygen escaping, we did not have solutions to go home. We knew we were in deep trouble. This like a game of solitaire. You turn up a card and that is a crisis. If you can put it someplace, Division Keeps going. You pull up a card and there is no place to put it, the game is over. That never occurred to us. Did thatind of impact adventure i use that word advisedly have on you . Mr. Lovell i dont worry about crisis any longer. Seriously. Myself,t them, i say to whenever i have a problem or trouble with something, somebody is sick or something, i say, i could have been gone back in 1970, im still here. I dont worry about crisis. Thehat caused you to write perilous voyage of apollo 13 . Mr. Lovell after we got back, the three of us, we looked at each other, dusted ourselves off, youre still alive. Has a lothis flight of invention to it, even before the explosion rings happened that were different. We ought to put this down on paper. We ought to write something. We all vowed that we would write something on paper. Of course, the best intentions. Jack went into politics, fred went into the aerospace industry, i went into the telephone industry. Jack died in 1983 and i retired in 1991. I still had my office and secretary. The day after i retired, i went back and said, what should we do . She said, why dont you write that book you been telling me about for 14 years . Im notgood idea, but an author. I have written articles. About that time, a young man who was a writer for the Discover Magazine wrote and said, i would like to do a story on it. How long before hollywood discovered that book . Mr. Lovell it is interesting. We wrote one chapter and we put it online. This is a proposal for a book publisher. Our agents sent around it to various book publishers. We finally found one. I was very happy. This is something to keep me off the golf courses, postretirement. We have not yet written another chapter. We were doing research, calling up people in nasa to say, can you help us out . I was sitting at my sitting got a calland we from my agent. He said, are you sitting down . I thought maybe the book publisher was going to back out. He said, we sold your book to the movies. I sit, we have not written it yet. Isnt that illegal . He said, no, its done all the time. What they sold was an option to do the story to ron howards company. What turned the option into a finished project was the lead actor, tom hanks. Not die,closet after guy, aoset astronaut space enthusiast. He lobbied for the job. When universal heard that ron howard had tom hanks, who had gotten the oscar for philadelphia, they decided to do the movie. Thats how it got started. What did your wife say when you said, guess who is going to play me . [laughter] mr. Lovell could not believe it. [laughter] i had an interview with ron howard after he bought the option and this is before tom hanks was on board. We went out for five hours to talk about the story. At the end, i was and, of course, when you buy, after i read the contract, when you sell the book to the movies, youve sold it, they can put it on mars, you know, and do anything they want. But i have to be quite honest, i could not have picked a better Production Team with ron howard, a better group of actors, and also, the woman who played my wife than the group they had gathered together to do that movie. It was perfect. And it was a winwin situation for everybody. Nasa certainly, i think, liked it. We used the zerog airplane to get the sequences, the first time it had ever been done. The public enjoyed it, i think. Im happy. Jeff kluger is happy the way the book was portrayed. It was quite a deal. There have been all kinds of books about the astronauts, and about the various space flights. Has nasa and have you gentlemen been treated fairly by the popular press . I think so. There is always critics. And especially the movie, when the movie came out, the space enthusiasts here, you know, all the space guys here said, there are 125 mistakes in that movie. But, you know, weve been nicely handled by the press with the book. I wrote it, we wrote it, i should say, in the we frame. Not that i did this or i did that. It was not a biography or auto biography. We talk about lovell, hayes, gene, all the people because we wanted to write it in that way. You are watching American History tv on cspan three. To join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. Television has changed since cspan began 41 years ago, but our mission continues, to provide an unfiltered view of government. Already this year, we brought you primary election coverage, the primary impeachment the you cancoverage listen on our free radio app and be part of the National Conversation through cspans daily washington journal through our social media feed. Cspan americas Cable Television company. As a private service and brought to you by your television provider. Cspan has roundtheclock coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic and it is all available on demand at cspan. Org coronavirus. Watch white house briefings, updates from governors and state officials, track the spread throughout the u. S. And the world with interactive maps. Atch on demand, unfiltered cspan. Org coronavirus. You are watching American History tv, covering history, cspanstyle with event coverage, eyewitness accounts, archival films, lectures in College Classrooms and visits to museums and historic places. All weekend, every weekend on cspan three. Cspan3. 50 years ago, on april 11, 19 70, apollo 13 launched on what. O be the third nasa mission an onboard explosion on route caused trickle system failures that force the mission to abort and return to earth. Next, jean krantz shares his memories of apollo 13, detailing how nasas ground team worked to ensure its safe return. This is an interview conducted as part of nasas oral history program. Business of mission control, the business of spaceflight, what you have to do is make your decisions based on the technical data and that is this teams job to do and it is up to the people who sit in consult behind the flight director to take the political heat from whatever decision had to be made, and this is the kind of inspired leadership we had in the programha
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