The Rescue

After the Oxygen tank had exploded, the command module had lost its electrical power causing the crew to shut down the command module in fifteen minutes, and in doing so, transferring all the data from the command module to the lunar module.  Afterwards, in mission control, Sy Liebergot decided to shut down fuel cells 1 and 3 to stop the oxygen leak (causing the lunar landing abortion).  His plan failed.  Later on, after the crew had swung around th moon, they had to fire the LEM's engine for their PC +2 burn.  Then they had to shut down the lunar module to conserve power and were forced to coast home in cold, and darkness.  No one knew what the affect of this would be on the hardware.  As if the crew had not already dealt with enough, Carbon dioxide was filling the lunar module and the crew had built a filter using nothing but what they had onboard.  Their plans succeeded and rid the cabin of the poisonous air.  Due to the abortion of the lunar landing, there were no rocks on board making the spacecraft underweight.  They had to manually burn the LEM's engine while keeping the Earth in the window to put them back on course.  They had accomplished their burn in 14 seconds.  Nearing the end of their voyage, the tired and exhausted crew had jettisoned their service module.  Lovell, Haise, and Swigert discovered that one whole side of the panel had blown off the spacecraft, possibly cracking their heat shield.  With everything powered up (thanks to Ken Mattingly), the crew sadly jettisoned their lifeboat which had saved their lives.  The crew was not out of the woods yet...the parachutes could have been three blocks of ice...the guidance system might have been malfunctioning...the thrusters may have been frozen...the heat shield could have been cracked...and their trajectory may have been off.  This was the critical moment.  Re-entry had begun.  As little drops of rain fell on the crew as they plummeted towards Earth, millions of people waited to see if the three men would survive the blazing inferno.  Re-entry was to last three intense minutes.  Three minutes flew by, and there was no word.  Then four minutes with no word.  Millions put their head down in grief when all of a sudden, three big, blooming shoots had appeared in the sky.  Attatched to those shoots were three men locked inside a capsule slowly falling toward the water.  Lovell, Haise, and Swigert (deceased) never go to go to walk on the moon.  They didn't need to.  Apollo 13 was as big a success as any other Apollo mission flown.  Maybe even the most. 

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