Question: waht happened 2 apollo13

Andrea Boyd answered on 16 Jun 2016:

Apollo 13 was what we call in Flight Control a ‘successful failure’ – they didn’t do the Moon landing mission but NASA fixed the spaceship all crew returned to Earth safe!

Oxygen tank No. 2 blew up, causing the No. 1 tank to also fail. The command module’s normal supply of electricity, light and water was lost, and they were about 200,000 miles from Earth.

It was actually more dramatic in real life than in the Apollo 13 movie. NASA Mission Control had to form a special team and work 24/7 to come up with brand new engineering solutions to keep everyone safe.

Firstly – they had only 20minutes of power left in the main spaceship command module. Meaning freezing, dark and death. So they quickly moved to the Lunar Module and closed the hatch. But that didn’t have a way to produce enough Oxygen and they lost all basically all their Oxygen from the tanks that blew up. So next big thing was breathing so they didn’t die. NASA Mission Control came up with an amazing solution to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen using only items the lunar module already had inside. And now the biggest problem was the explosion spun them in some random direction so they were trying to navigate home because the Lunar Module had no way to do that – they couldn’t see Earth, they didn’t have their navigation computer anymore, GPS didn’t exist and even if it did they were about 170,000miles too far away to use it and so they had to find stars outside to plan where to go. Only there was so much rubbish and pieces from the explosion they couldn’t see stars. So they came up with another amazing engineering solution for that. They barely had any fuel left and didn’t want to use it up plus you don’t want to fire engines in a random direction – when you’re in space there’s no resistance so you’ll move in that direction forever. Also they needed a way to power the command module batteries because they had to move back to that to land on Earth (command module had heat shield and landing parachutes, lunar module would burn up in Earth atmosphere) so they had to engineer a solution to use the lunar module batteries to transfer power and charge the main spaceship command module batteries. They didn’t have a lot of food and water, 3 people were stuck in a space made for two people, they didn’t have a toilet and the lunar module was only 4 oC!!! It’s an incredible feat of engineering and teamwork that they survived, navigated safely back to Earth and reentered the atmosphere and landed safely. Hence successful failure! NASA learnt a lot.

(The oxygen tanks exploded because they changed the power from 28 to 65 VDC without changing the thermostat switches on the heaters to match. NASA left these heaters on when the rocket was on the launch pad for so long that the wiring was heated up to 550 oC!!! This killed the teflon insulation and basically welded the switches shut. So it was a sitting bomb… and this bomb blew up in space when they were 200,000miles out of the 225,000 mile trip to the moon)