Apollo 13's Duct-Tape Fix

Fifty five hours, fifty five minutes and nineteen seconds into the flight. Two hundred thousand miles from Earth. Something goes bang. Then a voice, flat and careful, the way pilots sound when they're scared. Okay, Houston... we've had a problem here. Here's what I want you to sit with. Three men are now dying slowly inside a machine that can no longer keep them alive... and the thing that saves them gets built out of a sock, a plastic bag and gray duct tape. That's not a joke. That's the fix. Rewind a few days. Apollo thirteen is supposed to be the third landing on the Moon, and the crew won't stop changing. Backup lunar module pilot Charlie Duke unknowingly exposes everyone to German measles. Ken Mattingly has no immunity. So NASA pulls him, roughly forty eight hours before the count, and drops in his backup, Jack Swigert, thirty eight years old, first spaceflight. Remember Mattingly. Grounded. Watching the rocket leave without him. He is going to matter more than anyone in that building expects. Third day out. April thirteenth, nineteen seventy. The crew has just wrapped a television broadcast, proudly showing off their two spacecraft, the lunar module Aquarius and the command module Odyssey. Down in Houston, Jim Lovell's wife Marilyn watches from the visitors gallery. Tomorrow, lunar orbit. The day after, Lovell and Fred Haise walk in the Fra Mauro highlands. Nine oh eight in the evening, Houston time, an oxygen tank in the service module ruptures. And the Moon quietly stops being the mission. Plain engineering, fast. Apollo makes its electricity in fuel cells, and fuel cells need oxygen. Lose the oxygen, you lose the power. Lose the power, you lose the heat, the water, the radios, the air. So Mission Control makes the coldest call on the table. Shut Odyssey down. Every amp left in those reentry batteries gets hoarded for the last few hours. The crew climbs into Aquarius... a fragile landing craft built to keep two men alive for two days. They're asking it to keep three men alive all the way home. Then comes the problem nobody planned for. You exhale carbon dioxide. Scrubbers soak it up, using canisters of lithium hydroxide, and Aquarius doesn't carry nearly enough for three people on a long ride home. There are spares next door in Odyssey. One catch. The command module was built by one contractor. The lunar module by another. The command module canisters are square. The lunar module sockets are round. Two hundred thousand miles from the nearest hardware store... and the parts don't fit. Enter Ed Smylie, chief of crew systems. His first idea, running hoses from Odyssey's scrubbers, dies fast, because Odyssey has to stay dark. So his team builds instead from whatever is already floating inside that spacecraft. Spare canisters get flown in by chartered plane so they can test the thing for real, on the ground, that same afternoon. Then they read the instructions up to three exhausted men sitting in the cold. A spacesuit hose. A sock. A plastic bag. The cover of the flight plan. Duct tape. They call it the mailbox. And it works. Breathing is one crisis. Electricity is the other. Flight director Gene Kranz calls in John Aaron and hands him something close to absolute power over power. Aaron can veto any engineer's idea that costs a single amp. And working beside him is Ken Mattingly, the man measles kept on the ground, writing a brand new procedure to wake Odyssey up on almost nothing. To make it fit, Aaron breaks a rule. Telemetry, the system that tells Houston whether the startup even worked, goes on LAST. Nobody finds out if the plan works until minutes before reentry. April seventeenth. Odyssey has sat cold and damp for days, walls dripping with condensation, exactly the conditions that short out electronics. It powers up clean. Partly thanks to standards rebuilt after the Apollo one fire. The service module is jettisoned, and the crew finally sees the wound, a whole panel blown away. One hundred and forty two hours after launch, Odyssey hits the Pacific about four miles from the recovery ship Iwo Jima. So, the sock. It really did help bring three men home. But the sock isn't the lesson. Smylie later reckoned around sixty people worked on that one fix, and he was blunt about it, saying the book and the movie make it sound like he did all of it. Sixty people. One afternoon. No rehearsal. And NASA's answer afterward was unglamorous and perfect. Add a bigger backup battery. Add water bags. As new crews head back toward the Moon, that's still the whole trick. Improvise brilliantly today... then make sure nobody ever has to improvise that again.