A Successful Failure in Apollo 13 Project

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Recommended: Success of Apollo 13

After watching the Apollo 13 movie, it is interesting to know that this was a “Successful failure” of a project. This is due to the fact that astronauts returned to Earth safely but they never made it to the moon. After the crew headed for the moon they had to disappointedly cancel the mission before it could be completed and return to earth, when the oxygen tank that exploded caused the spacecraft to malfunctioning.

A brief history to puts things in perspective, Apollo program was established in July 1960 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). As it is normal the case, there were failures with the program in the beginning, below is the list of the missions that preceded Apollo 13:

• Apollo 1, launched on 27 January 1967 – during pre-launch there was an on-board fire that killed the crew.

• Apollo 7 (Second Mission), which was launch on 11 October 2068 – which was the first mission to successfully leave the earth and reached lower orbit of the earth. The crew returned safely.

• Apollo 8, launched on 21 December 1968 – this was the second successful mission and the first to reach the surface of the moon. The crew was led by Neil A. Armstrong, returned safely to earth.

• Apollo Missions’ 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 – these were all the successful missions that saw the crew landing into the moon and returned with valuable information, i.e. soil, lunar ranging, solar with experiments, etc.

The Launch of Apollo 13 took place on the 11 April 1970, it consisted of a crew, James A. Lovell, JR which was a commander, John L. Swigert, Jr., which was a command module pilot and Fred W. Haise, Jr., who was a Lunar module pilot. It appears that all test modules were successfully in preparation for the lau...

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...Decision Making.

Another success story in this mission was the “risk recovery mission”, which was meant to remove the carbon dioxide from rising in Apollo 13, this demonstrated teamwork and continuous improvement.

“Failure is not an option” the Commander in charge of the control room is heard saying these words. These are wise words to keep team motivated. In summary here we see the three astronauts fighting for their lives as they had not power and oxygen to survive and this concluded their trip and they needed a quick plan to take them quick to the earth. This cancelled the normal lunar landing. After a lengthy investigation it was deduced that the cause for the failure occurred in 1965 when the underrated component had to be replaced. This was during the designed modification; this oversight appeared to have affected the internal heating elements of the tank.

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