Apollo 13
Apollo 13 launched on April 11, 1970 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crewmembers aboard the ship were James A. Lovell Jr., John L. Swigert Jr., and Fred W. Haise, Jr. Before the launch, there had been a few problems. Thomas K. Mattingly was supposed to fly on the Apollo 13 but he was exposed to the measles. He didn’t have the antibodies to fight the disease, causing him to not be able to go into space. Swigert took his place. Right before the launch, one of the technicians saw that the helium tank had a higher pressure than expected. Nothing was done to fix this. During liftoff, the second-stage engine shut down, causing the other engines to run longer than planned. Apollo 13 was off to a rocky start.
During the flight, the second oxygen tank exploded. The oxygen tank contained liquid required for fuel and oxygen. Liquid oxygen has to be handled very carefully. The astronauts need to constantly stir the oxygen to prevent it from separating. The wires in the device needed to stir the oxygen were damaged, causing a big fire when electricity was passed through them. The explosion caused the number one oxygen to be critically damaged. This was bad because it left the ship with little power. Clueless about the real reason for the explosion, the crew thought a meteoroid had hit them. There was a large amount of damage caused by the explosions. Lovell looked out of the window, thirteen minutes after the explosion. He noticed that the ship was venting some gas out into space. Oxygen gas was leaking out of the spacecraft. Reacting on impulse, the astronauts closed the hatched between the Command Module and Lunar Module. Slowly, the crew and ground controllers began to realize that Apollo 13 was losing oxygen. Ap...
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... to be separated from the ship. The Command Module had to be powered up again after being shut down for a long time. Mission Control had to write new documents for this new action. Normally, documents are written in three months before being performed. Mission Control, obviously, did not have that amount of time, causing them to have to write new documents in three days. Next, the crew got in the command module and let the lunar module go. The hard part was over. The ship landed safely in the South Pacific Ocean. The crew was rescued and brought onto the USS Iwo Jima. All three astronauts were returned to Earth unharmed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_13/overview/
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo-13/apollo-13.html
http://www.nasm.si.edu/collections/imagery/apollo/AS13/a13sum.htm
The Space Race was a 20th century competition between the soviet union And the United States for supremacy in spaceflight ability. The launch date for apollo 13 was originally in March of 1970 but later the launch date switched to april. During one of the countdown demonstrations the Kennedy Space Center encountered problems with the oxygen tanks in the service module. When the apollo 13 mission took off their main goal was to land in the Fra Mauro area on the moon. An explosion in one of the oxygen tanks crippled the spacecraft during the flight and the crew were forced to orbit the moon and return to earth without landing. The Apollo 13 mission was launched on April 11th in the year 1970. For the first few days of the flight the crew ran into a couple minor accidents, but Apollo 13 was looking like the smoothest flight of the program. They aborted the mission after 56 hours of flight due to an explosion in the oxygen tanks. “At 5 ½ minutes after liftoff John Swigert, Fred Haise and James Lovell felt a little vibration then the center engine of the S-II stage shut down two minutes early. This caused the remaining 4 engines to burn 34 seconds longer than planned, and the S-IVB third stage had to burn nine seconds longer to put Apollo 13 in orbit.” (nasa.gov) At 55 hours and 46 minutes the crew was finishing a live tv broadcast showing how well they were doing and how they comfortably lived.
All of the Apollo crews and mission control teams were well trained to operate under high-stress situations. All three crew members were previously test pilots, so they were all experienced in dealing with high-risk situations with no room for error. They were able to effectively communicate the problems they were experiencing back to the crew members in mission control. Both parties were able to communicate calmly and clearly, with little to no change in tone as the accident transpired. The ground crew members related all information to the flight crew, not withholding any information that they deemed pertinent to the
...ause it was the mission that NASA was able to put the first man up onto the moon. Neil Armstrong was the pilot of the Apollo 11 flight. There was a special shuttle that was attached to the spaceship; it was called the Eagle. The Eagle was designed to transport some crew members down to the moon. Armstrong was responsible for driving and landing the shuttle safely down to the moon. While on his way down to the moon, Armstrong realized that he was starting to run out of fuel. Thankfully, Armstrong did have enough to land on the moon and make it back up to the spaceship. When the Eagle was leaving the spaceship for the first time up in space, it wasn't completely depressurized so there was something like a gas bubble come from the shuttle as it was on its way to the moon. The gas bubble moved the shuttle off course and the Eagle actually landed four miles off course.
motto that carried him through the Apollo 13 crisis, is a major theme of his
“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.
Engineers and scientists began trying to find what went wrong almost right away. They studied the film of the take-off. When they studied the film, they noticed a small jet of flame coming from inside the casing for one of the rocket boosters. The flame got bigger and bigger. It started to touch a strut that connected the booster to the big fuel tank attached to the space shuttle. About two or three seconds later, hydrogen began leaking from the gigantic fuel tank. About seventy-two seconds after take-off, the hydrogen caught on fire and the booster swung around. That punctured the fuel tank, which caused a big explosion.
“Houston we have a problem,” those words caught the attention of the world on April 13, 1970 during the flight of Apollo 13. The movie Apollo 13, made in 1995, is based on Jim Lovell’s autobiography called Lost Moon, published in 1994. Lovell was the commander of the Apollo 13 mission; Tom Hanks played him in the movie. The crew also included Jack Swigert and Fred Haise. In general, the movie does a good job of portraying the flight of Apollo 13; however there are some significant differences. The producers of the movie consulted with Jim Lovell while making it, and he wanted it to be as accurate as possible. One reason for the deviations is that if the movie showed everything in the book, it would be close to ten hours long and to hard to understand for the average viewer. The book has a lot of technical detail that is left out of the movie, because the movie is intended for a larger audience. The movie includes several scenes that are not in the book, but they aren’t significant to the plot. Graphics make the movie better, because they make it more dramatic and easier to understand. Several of the characters are represented differently from in the book, especially Lovell, who is not as significant as he is portrayed to be in the movie.
After safely exiting the Earth’s atmosphere and heading on course, a routine oxygen tank stir that was required often during space missions caused a coil in the tank to break loose and erupt, creating new unforeseen problems. The blast forced open most of the oxygen tanks as they leaked into space, increased the levels of carbon dioxide within the command module the men were traveling in, and severely decreased their power capabilities. Immediately NASA assembled the best and brightest men they had on staff to assess the situation and Flight Director Gene Kranz (played by Ed Harris) called off the Moon landing, changing the final task of the mission to a safe return home. Through repeated calculation, experimentation by Ken Mattingly who knew the module systems well, and a bit of luck, the men managed to slingshot themselves around the Moon, using its gravity to head back home on course. With...
Jim Lovell, Ken Mattingly, and Fred Haise train for their new mission. Days before the launch, Mattingly is discovered to have been exposed to rubella, and the flight surgeon demands his replacement with Mattingly 's backup, Jack Swigert, as a safety precaution. After a few days in space Swigert performs a standard housekeeping procedure, one of two liquid oxygen tanks explodes, emptying its contents into space and sending the craft tumbling. The other tank is soon found to be leaking. Mission Control aborts the Moon landing, Lovell and Haise hurriedly power up Aquarius as a "lifeboat" for the return home, and Swigert shuts down Odyssey before its battery power runs out. In Houston, Kranz rallies his team to come up with a plan to bring the astronauts home safely, declaring "failure is not an option". Controller recruits Mattingly to help restart Odyssey for the final
Apollo 13 was a mission that some may grow to learn was a failure; It was in fact the complete opposite. Space entry was improved immensely, with the efforts and struggles gained from previous missions. In addition, one of the victims of this mission, Jim Lovell, “believed it was a success. Everyone was tested on their ability to work together and that is how Apollo 13 succeeded” (Anastasio 90). Future space entry missions would not have been as successful as they are without previous missions bettering the space program.
Little did anyone know or expect this would be the most rewarding mission since 1961. Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins left from the Kennedy Space Center on the east coast of Florida on July 16,1969. Michael Collins was the command module pilot, Neil Armstrong was the mission commander, and Buzz Aldrin was the lunar module pilot. The Apollo 11 crew traveled 240,000 miles in just 72 hours, Apollo 11 entered into a lunar orbit on July 19,1696. Collins detached for the lunar module The mission was already ahead of schedule with Americans waiting to see what was going to happen next for their country. At 10:39 p.m., Armstrong, being televised, opened the hatch of the lunar module, and three minutes later Armstrong made history by putting his left foot of the moon’s powdery surface. When Armstrong stepped down from the last step from the spacecraft, all of America jumped for excitement and joy. Aldrin soon joined Armstrong 19 minutes later, and together they took photographs, then planted the United States flag. President Nixon was so very blessed and honored that he was able to witness America make history on July 24, 1969 along with all of the other Americans. Returning back to Earth
This film focuses on the events of Apollo 13, which was a mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s manned spaceflight program. The goal of the mission was to land two astronauts on the moon to collect geological samples. However, the crew never made it there because an explosion in the middle of their flight damaged much of their rocket and its systems. Leaving
Apollo 13’s launch day was April 11, 1970, with the intention to explore the Fra Mauro formation. It is a hilly area that is thought to be made of ejecta from the impact that formed Mare Imbrium. It got its name from the 80-kilometer Fra Mauro crater which is found in it.
On April 13, 1970, NASA's Mission Control heard the five words that no control center ever wants to hear: "We've got a problem here." Jack Swigert, an astronaut aboard the Apollo 13 aircraft, reported the problem of broken down oxygen tanks to the Houston Control Center, less than two days after its takeoff on April 11th. Those at the Control Center in Houston were unsure what had happened to the spacecraft, but knew that some sort of explosion had occurred. This so-called explosion sent Apollo 13 spinning away from the Earth at 2,000 miles per hour, 75 percent of the way to the moon. In order to get the astronauts back to the Earth's atmosphere would be to utilize the moon's gravitational pull and send them back towards home, like a slingshot. However, this procedure would require three days, and this demanded more oxygen and electricity than the crew had available to them. Eugene "Gene" Kranz, head of this flight mission, although looking on in horror, began thinking of solutions to the problem immediately after the Controls were aware of the problem on board. Knowing that the options of refueling the spacecraft with oxygen or retrieve the astronauts himself, he needed to think of a strategy for a safe return. In this sense, if his solution fails, it could result in the biggest catastrophe in NASA history.