Dan Snow's History Hit - Apollo 13

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

I was joined by Kevin Fong, who took me through one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of exploration. Apollo 13 was the seventh crewed mission on the Apollo space programme, and their third attempt to land on the moon. But after an oxygen tank in the command module ignited early on in the mission, the three astronauts got much more than they bargained for. As each of the systems in the space craft began to shut down one after another over a course of four excruciating days, it seemed impossible they would come out alive.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everyone, welcome to Downsenders History. It's a full moon as I speak these words. I'm looking out the window at a supermoon, one of the biggest moons of the year.

It's a beautiful sight and it is understandable why so many of us became obsessed with the journeys to the moon conducted in the late 20th century by NASA. We've heard already on this podcast on the anniversary of Apollo 11. The extraordinary story of the first flight that landed successfully on the moon. Kevin Fong was there, Professor Kevin Fong, all-round legend, was there to tell us about that. And he's got another podcast series out now about Apollo 13. Apollo 13, some say it was unlucky from the start. It was due to take off at 13.13 on the 11th of April. It was due to arrive on the moon on the 13th of April, but it never arrived for reasons that you're about to find out. So Kevin Fong is on the podcast. Kevin is not only a superb doctor, a healthcare specialist, an author, broadcaster. Kevin at the moment is playing

a central role in the COVID response from NHS England. He's got a strategic role and I for one feel enormously comforted and happy that Kevin Fong is on the front line of this battle against the virus because if anyone is going to contribute it is Kevin Fong. He's a friend, he's a friend and he's a national treasure. This podcast is all about Apollo 13. I caught up with him just before he went into full-time action stations against COVID. He talked me through the flight of Apollo 13 in his usual wonderful way. You can see history. You can see as much history as you like. You can go back and listen to all our other podcasts on History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. In these times, it might be useful to have an endless supply of history to watch.

If you do that over at History Hit TV, if you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free. And then you get a month for just one pound a euro or dollar after that. So the next two months of lockdown for just one pound a euro or dollar sounds pretty good. So check it out, everyone.

Thank you very much for signing up. Lots of people are doing that at the moment. It's good to have you on board. And in the meantime, everyone, here is the legend that is Kevin Fong. Kevin Fong, thank you very much coming back on the podcast a pleasure to be here it was only a few months ago that you were on talking about what turned out to be no doubt because you're a smash hit global phenomenon which was your 30 minutes the the moon. Now, obviously, you're back with the big one. We are, and we're back less than a year later

because NASA cracked out their further missions to the moon in pretty rapid succession. So Apollo 13, the third mission to the moon, happened less than 12 months after the first landing of Apollo 11. So yeah, we're back covering that 50th anniversary this April. That is insane. So talk me through. You go, so Apollo 11 lands on the moon.

When's the next one go up? So I think Apollo 12 is in November of the same year, 69. So, you know, just to show that it wasn't a fluke, they put together Apollo 12. Apollo 12 has a fairly heroic story. It's taking off off the launch pad and is struck by lightning on its way out. And everything goes haywire. But one of the flight controllers saves that mission and then they get away and they do that and then by the time april rolls around 1970 they're lining up for mission

number three to the moon which is apollo 13 as you say though that is there's something about that it's like nagasaki following after hiroshima Once you could say, well, they threw, they put all their eggs in one bus. To go twice in six months is amazing. It is incredible. It's incredible that they decided to go even more than once, really, when you look at the risks involved.

And here's the thing. So by the time they're going for the third time, and I find this incredible, by the third time they're going, they're sending people off the surface of the earth at 25 000 miles an hour to a celestial body that lies a quarter of a million miles away only the fifth and six people to walk on the moon should have been the american public have lost interest no one's covering it it's like it's not it's no big thing anymore and so this is a feat that it barely existed at the limits of their consciousness less than 12 months earlier and now it's like oh we that's

what we do we go to the moon so so there's there's very little press hoopla about this mission when it's gearing up isn't that amazing and i could not tell you the names of the astronauts on apollo 12 i mean so that just shows. I mean, yeah, it's just baked in. Oh, yeah, we go to the moon. Well, I know. Isn't it horrific that in the whole history of the world, there's only 12 people who have ever set foot

on the surface of the moon, and yet we can basically only manage Armstrong and Aldrin? And it's shocking, really. It's shocking. But Apollo 13 comes around around and people are like, yeah, let's not cover that in the news. We understand. We go to the moon. There's not much press hoopla in the build-up.

There's a little bit of coverage because there's this weird thing that happens where one of the crew members of Apollo 13, the crew should have been commanded by a guy called James Jim Lovell and Fred Hayes was a rookie astronaut and then there was going to be Ken Mattingly who was also going to be there but Ken Mattingly gets exposed to a case of the German measles pre-launch and so they scrub him out of his mission and they replace him with a guy called Jack Swigert so so he's cancelled at the last minute the press think that's a bit interesting but not very and then the launch

happens what we've everyone has now listened to your first podcast your series how was apollo 13 different to apollo 11 what they absorbed what it got what it improved so if the mission had gone to plan this was meant to be a genuinely sort of scientific expedition james loveall was quite a romantic explorer. I mean, he's a Navy test pilot and he'd flown in the US Navy in carrier operations. So he was an impressive guy. But he was sort of in love

with a romantic idea of exploration. He thought this was his Lewis and Clark adventure. He designed the mission patch and wonderfully he talked to us about it when we interviewed him. And he's an incredible guy. I can't remember. I think he's 92 or 93 now.

It's something. He's in his 90s crystal clear and he talks about choosing the logo for the mission patch so when you fly you have these cloth mission patches that you stitch onto your suits the motto is ex luna scientia so so from the moon knowledge and he called his command module odyssey because that's what he thought he was going on. So total romance, and a total desire to go to the Fraumaurer Highlands, so this very cratered area of the moon, to do some proper geological surveys. So they've gone past the point where this is, you know, you get to the moon and you do it like a bank job. You get in, you get out, you stay alive.

And now they're going to hang around, they're going to dig stuff up, they're really going to try and do some survey, and he's up for all of that, and he longs to set foot on the moon and the important thing to remember about jim lovell is he was a member of the crew as a rookie that flew on apollo 8 and they flew around the moon they didn't land on it in 1968 which itself was a heroic mission so he's seen the moon from about a hundred and something nautical miles altitude and he wants he wants more desperately than anything else to set foot on it and this is his mission he's in command he's going and so when he launches on i think it's april the 11th 1970 he's so up for it and then it all goes

wrong but but was it the same technology the same methods or had they learned as i have learned so much from apollo 11 and from your series as it were? It's the same technology when they go on Apollo 13 and later on they start upping the ante and taking lunar rovers but for these missions it's the same rubric as Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 but they're easier about the whole thing in a way it's well known for them by this point at least operationally so you know they're in their groove but it's the same mission but it has all the same risks as apollo 11 although in the minds of the media is routine it's still desperately desperately dangerous it's still desperately

risky so yeah same same mission same technology same sorts of risks as apollo 11 but now this is just the third time you're doing it okay then, then tell me, so what goes wrong? They take off, they blast into space, and then what happens? They blast into space, and it's hilarious talking to Lovell about this. He's like, yeah, it's old hat for me. I'm just racing off the Earth in a Saturn V rocket. He's telling his two rookie astronauts, Swigert and Hayes, what to expect as they peel off. They have five big engines on the first stage of the Saturn V,

and they have a dropout of one of the engines. And he says, yeah, but they ride through that. It's not a big deal. And he says, you know, that's our big, that's going to be our big glitch for this mission. Every mission has a glitch that was ours. But he's wrong. They get into orbit around the

earth they inject themselves on their translunar trajectory so you basically you go around the other couple of times you check everything out you fire your engine to get you on a translunar trajectory so that pings you out of earth orbit on the way to the moon and they're coasting then for an uneventful couple of days on the third day 200 nearly 200 000 miles from earth they've just done a television broadcast back to earth but no one's watching the press don't turn up to the press gallery the networks can't be bothered to carry it live because you know what's there to see just three men hurtling through space on their way to the moon we've seen this one before and they just finished that he doesn't really know that no one's particularly watched that. And they're just settling in for the night.

And they do this thing where they, this fascinating piece of technology, they have these oxygen tanks and they hold cryogenically stored oxygen. So oxygen held below its boiling point, which is minus 183 degrees Celsius. So insanely cold. And it sits there in this tub, like sort of almost layered like a sort of fog, I guess. Gene Kranz, the flight director, described it as a slush. And they have to stir it every now and again. And they click the switch and it stirs up.

Only, there's this problem. The tank is faulty because it's been damaged about 18 months earlier. There's a bare wire sitting in a tank of pure oxygen, and when they flick the switch, it sparks, and it blows the tank up and starts a fire in the command and service module, and it just takes out almost every vital system of that module. And so suddenly they're sitting there, and they're watching all the alarms come on at the same time,

and they can't believe what they're seeing. And this is mission controllers seeing this, the astronauts are seeing this, and they're watching all the alarms come on at the same time, and they can't believe what they're seeing. And this is mission control seeing this, the astronauts are seeing this, and they're thinking, this can't be true, because if this is true, we're dead. And so back in mission control, there's just denial. This was the fascinating thing for me. So I've always seen this as, you know, NASA just ice cold sang foie, just sail through this and just deal with it. But we talked to the controllers who dealt with it.

And, you know, one of them was saying, look, this was such a bad failure. If what we were seeing down in Mission Control was real, it was a failure so profound and so widespread that I thought, I should just pack up and go home. There's nothing I can do. And the other thing I found quite impressive, listening to the audio. You know, the podcast is impressive, listening to the audio. You know, the podcast is all about listening to the mission audio and trying to find out more from listening to that audio

than you already know of the story. These were young people, so the average age of the flight controllers, the people who controlled the mission, was 26 years old. And when you hear them on Apollo 11, you can't believe they're 26-year-olds. They're so confident. You know, they're so complete in their answers they're so sure of themselves in that opening hour of that accident after the tank blows up you can hear this hint of fearful youth you can hear this dissembling amongst them and Gene Kranz who's their flight director their leader it's all he can do is to stop them disintegrating. So for me, in terms of

listening to how the decisions are made, the decision making here, that was fascinating. Okay, so basically, how on earth did they get back to earth after that? I mean, that's ridiculous. So there's an explosion and a fire in the command and service module. How did they survive? So the command module is this cone shaped vehicle that's pretty robust. And underneath it, there's this sort of cylindrical thing called the service module that has their engine and their supplies and life support. So the fire and the explosion happens in there. So they're walled off from it. So they just hear this thump, this explosion really,

and then see every alarm come on, but they can't see the fire. They just know that something's going wrong. They're losing oxygen and they're losing power. Now, you talk about losing power and you think, well, I've been in a power cut in my house, it's not that big of a deal. You sit around, you sing songs around candles. But for a spacecraft, the power is the lifeblood of the vehicle. The power, the electricity is what keeps the vehicle alive and the vehicle is what keeps the astronauts alive. So if the power dies the crew die and with no uncertainty at all they realize

that they are losing all the oxygen into space it's just ruptured the tanks are just ruptured they're losing all and they're losing their power so the vehicle is dying and they're about to follow suit and so what they do is make that realization and then they have to accept that this vehicle is dying it's like a sinking ship and you do what you do in any sinking ship. You abandon ship into the lifeboat.

So what they do is on the Apollo missions there's two vehicles. There's the command module which takes them from Earth to the Moon. There's a lunar module which is this flimsy looking

spidery vehicle that takes them from lunar orbit down to the surface of the Moon and they bail into that. They use it as a lifeboat. It's supposed to be the vehicle that they'll land on the moon, and actually they're now using it as a lifeboat.

And that's their temporising measure. So the first thing they do is live, and that's hard enough. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer.

Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians.

Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. They get themselves into the lifeboat, they shut down the command module, and then after that is this amazing 87 hours of just fight, fight, fight. And you almost couldn't make it up. It's live today, die tomorrow. The whole thing is, okay, we've managed to get them into the lifeboat, now what? Well, now we're going to run out of power short of Earth. Okay, we'll solve that problem, now what?

Oh, now we've realised we're going to run out of life support before we get back to Earth. And so it's continuous. Over this next 87 hours, there's just rotating battle against a vehicle that's trying to die underneath them and then trying to stretch out the resources in the vehicle and get them the remaining 300,000 odd miles

all the way back to the Moon, round the back of the Moon and then back to Earth. So what is the secret to that? Well, it resides in the leadership of the flight directors, corralling this young, gifted, but very, very young crew of flight controllers. It's about the superlative performance of the astronauts who are there executing these recommendations that are being made to them by people on the ground. And the other thing is the strength of their preparation.

So that's really interesting. So I always thought Apollo 13 was this story of wall-to-wall improvisation. It was, you know, their heart was ripped out of their command module, and so they just made up their means of survival over the next four days. But actually, when we talked to these guys, they said, no, no, no. We had anticipated the possibility of many of these types of failures, just not all at the same time. And we had some ready-made plans for quite a lot of it. We had procedures.

We had written down procedures. So when, for example, they have to abandon ship and shut down the command module, they have a procedure that says, this is how you shut down the command module in a real hurry. And when they need to use the lunar module as a lifeboat, they have a vague procedure for that. So basically, this is all testament to the depth of preparation of NASA as an organization. It's not that they don't improvise. They just know that improvisation in the moment is a dangerous thing

because you can have hidden flaws in the plans. So they standardize everything they do until they absolutely have to improvise and for me that was the big lesson you know in my day job as a doctor and covering emergency cases that was what i took away from that i was like well you have to have a solid foundation of standardization that allows you to respond to something like that and then you improvise only when you have to and when you do that you do that as obsessively as you can but be wary of it we've seen the movie it was this idea that you kind of in terms of that small bit of improvisation it was finding out everything was on boards patching together systems i mean what was the most unlikely so what was the most improvised

element of this operation so by far and away the most improvised element of this operation? So by far and away, the most improvised element was the carbon dioxide scrubber. So as they come around the moon, as they're headed back towards the Earth, they realise that actually they've got enough oxygen probably to last them, but they have a problem because the carbon dioxide they're breathing out is building up in the cabin. Now, normally that's scrubbed out by these canisters of lithium hydroxide, but they're running out. And so they're running out in the lunar module, and they can't go and get the spare canisters from the command module

because they're the wrong shape. It's just literally one is a round canister and the other one is a square cylinder. So they have to make an adapter that allows them to put the square cylinders, adapt them to go the round filter holes for the lunar module. And so that requires them to just work out what they've got on board the vehicle, turn that into this sort of Heath Robinson looking thing

that allows you to do something that was never intended. And they're using literally the covers of instruction manuals, of emergency flight manuals on the book. They're using sort of duct tape and all the rest of that. One I'd never appreciated was when the guys in mission control build this thing, they say, this is how we're going to do it. We're going to build this adapter made out of sheets of cardboard and sellotape and stuff.

When they then describe that to the guys on the mission, there is no visual cue for them. And you take it so for granted that we live in a visual world and you say, you know, don't worry, here's a picture. I'll just text you the picture. There's nothing. There's no video link between the two places. So they're playing this sort of executive party game of reading up

these instructions verbally and the guys have to basically understand through the the spoken description what they have to build and they have to build something upon which their lives depend it's incredible that they pulled that off incredible okay so you taught me all about the command module in the first chat we had. So let me get it right. They're sitting in the spidery lunar lander. Yeah, which is tiny and which is built only to hold two people for a couple of days. And now it has to hold three people for four days. But that only has an engine on it.

That only has rockets to get it back to the mother ship, right right which it then docks with right so the engine on the lunar module is weaker than the engine on the command and service module the command and service is a big punchy engine that's meant to inject you on the way to the moon and inject you on the way back to earth the lunar module has a weaker engine but it's designed to burn for longer because it's you know meant for hovering around and finding a landing spot on the moon. So what they do is they use the lunar module as their primary engine to shunt their command module, the way a locomotive would shunt a train carriage. They've rehearsed that partially in earlier missions, but not to the extent that they did it in Apollo 13. The command module, they've had to escape from it. They climbed back in that for re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.

So here's the problems. And this is what makes it such a difficult problem. At the point at which the explosion goes and they have to abandon the command module, they get into the lunar module, and sure enough, that can give them oxygen to breathe in a safe harbour while they're travelling around the Moon and back to Earth.

But that can't re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. The skin of the lunar module is so thin that you could stick a pencil through it. You know, it was that thin. And so it's never going to survive reentry. It's not built for that. It's flimsy, flimsy as hell. So when they get back to Earth, they then have to bail back into the command module and prepare for reentry.

And this is the thing. They had to do this incredible staged set of problem solving. You have to survive the day after the explosion, and then you have to have this long range view of what's going to kill you now, what's going to kill you next hour, what's going to kill you tomorrow, what's going to kill you in four days time if you live that long. And then you have to split off all these teams and get them going solve that stuff it was amazing listening to these guys 50 years on talking about being part of that and the way that they talked about you know what their approach was and just how willing they were to go to the mat for this and that's the other thing that was interesting was when bad things

happen when you have these disasters they usually unpack over a few seconds or minutes. And then people write entire books about, you know, Chisley Sullenberger landing on the Hudson when both his engines failed. That's 208 seconds. And he's superlative throughout that whole time. But these guys are at it for 87 hours of this sort of slow motion car crash that threatens to kill them at every point and at every point they just refuse to give up on it keep going keep going keep going get all the way back but they do have to get back in the command module they have to get back into the command module and you know these are things that i didn't appreciate until we spoke to them in an interview

to them for the podcast was you know that whole thing of well if you can stretch the lunar module long enough to get back back to earth can you then get yourself back into the command module will the command module work once you've got back into it will it survive the re-entry is it damaged too much and it's sort of an article of great faith. You know, a lot of the contributors talked to us in literal religious terms about how they felt about the mission because they felt there was so much against them. And did the three astronauts think that they were going to burn up on re-entry? When they'd survived the initial shot, they're in the lunar lander, they're heading back to Earth, did they actually think they were going to pull this off?

So it's really interesting that. Really interesting that because i i got a chance to ask jim love all that you know we did this lovely interview with him and he was really honest about it really honest about it and there's this press conference of the crew that they have very shortly after they've returned and someone asked them that question indirectly says did you think you were going to die and they kind of brush it aside because as you do if you're a u.s navy tech former u.s navy test pilot someone's asking you if you're worried you're going to die? And they kind of brush it aside. Because as you do, if you're a former US Navy test pilot and someone's asking you if you're worried you're going to die, you ask him 50 years on, he's like, yeah, I had a very good idea.

I was probably not going to make it. And think about that, right? So I've heard people interviewed about incidents in which, you know, something crazy happens and people always say, did you think you were going to die? And they're like, nope, never crossed my mind. And I believe it of people in whom they're facing something

that unpacks over a few minutes because actually you probably don't have time to. But if you're in a vehicle that's just blown up and killed your life support and killed your supply of power and you're now improvising some solutions on the way back and then that's unpacking over 87 hours. You have plenty of time to have a dark tea time of the soul.

And that's not unique, but it's a very unusual situation to be in, to be trying to save your own life, have people trying to save your lives, but have time to stop and have that existential crisis about the whole thing. And it's very clear from the interviews with the astronauts certainly Jim Lovell admits that he felt, yep, I thought maybe I wasn't going to survive, which is incredible. Did any of them go back into space afterwards? Yes, well that's Lovell's last

mission and that's why it's quite mournful for Lovell. Lovell's a veteran by this point. It's his fourth mission in space and he so wanted to go to them moon that was the prize and this was going to be his last mission so he never goes again and it's interesting because i think the mission of apollo 13 wouldn't be remembered the way it is if he just landed on the moon but for him he would have preferred to have landed and fred hayes said the same thing to me he said

i said you know given how famous how epic the story has now become would you have preferred to have flown a mission that was successful but not remembered? Or would you have preferred to have had this? And he said, yeah, I would have preferred to have done my mission successfully and landed on the moon. And so that I thought was interesting too. Hayes does go back. He is part of the shuttle era. So he is responsible for tests, flying and qualifying the space shuttle so swiger doesn't go back into space i don't think i can't remember i don't think he does

and i guess last question what effect did apollo 13 have on the apollo program so on one hand it could boost it back up to public awareness but on the other hand it was a an expensive failure it is interesting that i think that it probably helped revive interest in what had been something that people had lost sight of as a daring endeavor you know this is the thing about the six missions to the moon that none of them was routine and none of them was without him mishap and none of them was without that none of them was routine and none of them was without mishap and none of them was without incidents which you thought, wow, they were lucky to get through that. But Apollo 13 underlines just how much jeopardy there was in those missions.

You know, 11 has the drama of the computer failure on the way down and the low-level fuel, you know, just before landing. 12 is struck by lightning on the way up. 13 has the explosion. I think it's 14 where this bizarre thing happens where the abort switch gets armed by a floating bit of solder and they have to drag some computer program out of bed and he has to read up a computer program to the crew so they can disarm the abort switch so it was never routine and ap Apollo 13, I think, underlines just how dangerous the whole thing was. It was absolutely fascinating talking to this team of people 50 years on,

with them able to be, perhaps for the first time, fully honest about what that experience was for them. And to look at how just close, how precarious the whole thing was, how close to the edge the whole thing was and so it was a great honour I loved making it as much as I loved making the first season so yeah I hope you're going to love listening

to it too. I mean the first season was just groundbreaking it was just some of the best factual content anywhere in the world and award winning and widely listened to. I hope this does as well I hope the BBC have got any sense and they just commission season three, four, five, six, seven and just do the whole of human spaceflight.

Good luck. Thank you. What's it called? Let's make sure everyone can listen to it. So it's a BBC World Service podcast. It's 13 Minutes to the Moon, season two, and it's the story of Apollo 13. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you

could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome.

But if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians.

Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. you