Today marks 40 years since Mission Control received one of the most famous transmissions in history: "Houston, we've had a problem." This simple sentence (which seems like an understatement in retrospect) started one of the most dramatic survival stories in human history, watched by millions around the country.
Most people know the story from the excellent movie Apollo 13. As good as it was, the movie couldn't tell the whole story (it would have been several days long!) The website Universe Today is currently in the early stages of an interesting series 13 Things that Saved Apollo 13 (enter Apollo 13 into the search box to find all the parts...would be nice if they put a little link to the entire series there). The series is based on the work of Jerry Woodfill, an engineer at NASA who was there for Apollo 13.
The first three parts are up and focus on the timing of the explosion, a stuck hatch that actually helped the crew, and why Ken Mattingly's measles scare turned out to be a good thing in terms of getting them back alive. As a bonus, today's episode of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast features an interview with Jerry Woodfill.
I was REALLY young at the time so can't say I remember anything specific about Apollo 13 (although I do remember watching some Apollo launches, including Apollo 17 because I got to stay up WAY past my bedtime and that was a big deal!) Even though I know how it ends, I still find the story more gripping and scarier than anything our masters of horror have managed to dream up...and more fulfilling when the astronauts and the fine people at Mission Control triumph in the end.Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.
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8 comments:
I remember the last line in the movie were Lovell (Hanks) asks referring to returning to the moon, "Who will be going back? And when will that be?"
Under the current president, it isn't going to happen anytime soon. Astronauts Lovell, Cernan, and Armstrong sign a letter chastising him for it.
I remember the Apollo missions. 13 was amazing. They were all amazing. To be shot up into space in a can...
I don't expect to see anything like that again in my lifetime.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D67kmFzSh_o
Years later, people said I was tripping when I told them I had heard that song much earlier.
I remember some of it, but I was still young enough to be mostly watching cartoons.
It's hard to put too much of the blame for NASA's current problems on Obama. Constellation was going nowhere fast to say the least.
You can go all the way back to the late 60's....Apollo was originally scheduled to have three more Moon landings (up to Apollo 20) and they were cancelled before Apollo 11 even got there. The Shuttle had to make all kinds of promises and compromises to get built (as did the ISS). Politics, more than doing good science and building a long term program, have been slapping NASA around for almost all of its history.
One of my favorite NASA stories is that of Keith Glennan, the first administrator of NASA. He was determined to keep politics and the military out of NASA as much as he could. When NASA was first launching satellites capable of taking photos of the Earth, the military was (understandably) interested in the technology. Glennan's response was (and I may be paraphrasing here) "If the optics are that good, we'll degrade them."
NASA has done some amazing things and has great people working for it...I have a lot of friends that work for NASA (mostly in the unmanned missions...and I have some connections to a couple of NASA missions myself). They are passionate about what they do, but can find working in the NASA system frustrating to be polite.
I would really really like to see a shuttle launch.
Awesome power!!!
I have an invite for the next Shuttle launch in May...here's hoping no major issues keep me away from it!
I was invited to the launch of the Swift satellite in 2004. Unfortunately, a very last minute delay meant I missed the launch. It wasn't a wasted trip, however. I got the Platinum Tour of the Cape...the Platinum Tour includes an elevator ride to the top of a Delta II rocket :)
Even if politics and the military were somehow kept completely out of NASA, I bet you that red tape would still snag a lot of it. Bureaucracy grows as companies and organizations grow. Then there's always the petty politics in offices and between departments.
SER, I would love to see it too! My cousin lives near there. He said you can feel the power though the ground when it launches.
So...Hale, can you hook up the JTI with some of those primo passes? ROAD TRIP!
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