Apollo 13 Research Paper

The aircraft began banking right and the Captain momentarily fixed it before banking hard right again. I think at this point something caused the aircraft to bank right therefore causing the Captain to become spatially disoriented. He began banking harder right thinking he was fixing the situation, but was actually making it worse. The 1st officer tried correcting the Captain by saying “Overbank. Overbank. Overbank”. However, the Captain seemed to ignore him and continued steering the aircraft to the right to a maximum bank angle of 111 degrees. At this point several factors were in play; the Captain was overconfident in his abilities, the first officer was not confident in his own abilities, and the engineer was quiet the whole time. Not giving any input in the situation until seconds before impact when he said “retard power”. The crewmembers were unable to recover from the overbank and impacted the Red Sea at 416

However, at 55hrs, 54mins and 53secs when the crew was 200,000 miles from Earth and closing in on the moon, mission controller Sy Liebergot saw a low-pressure warning signal on a hydrogen tank in Odyssey. The signal could have shown a problem, or could have indicated the hydrogen just needed to be resettled by heating and fanning the gas inside the tank. Swigert flipped the switch for the routine procedure. However when flipping the switch one of the oxygen tanks in the service module exploded. The explosion caused one of the spacecraft panels to rip off and damaged the fuel tanks killing the crew’s oxygen supply and the spacecraft then began to lose power. The crew notified Mission Control, with Swigert’s famous phrase, "Houston, we 've had a problem…”. Luckily the Apollo spacecraft was made up of two independent spacecrafts joined by a tunnel the main spacecraft named Odyssey and the lunar model named Aquarius.

The ground controllers had some major problems to solve. They had to write and test new procedures to send up to the crew for a safe arrival home. A new navigation problem had to be solved to provide the crew with a speedy return. Water was also a main concern. The crew was estimated to run out of water in about five hours. But tests on previous Apollo missions found that the ship could run without water for about seven hours. The astronauts began to conserve water by cutting the amount they drank to six ounces each day. The crew began to get dehydrated and they

A few days later Lovell and his crew take off on the Apollo 13 mission. At first all is well until the second oxygen tank explodes, causing many problems for the crew; the most potent problem being that the crew was losing oxygen fast. Luckily, due to much ingenuity by the crew and mission control, the crew is able to arrive safely to earth without the deaths of any astronauts.

Millions of people all over the world watched as Apollo 11 was launched from Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969. Two hours after it left Earth, the rocket Lunar Command and Landing Modules separated from the main rocket, and three days later the crew entered lunar orbit. A day later the landing section separated from the Lunar Command Module and landed on the moon.

The explosion ripped through a port side berthing compartment of the construction and repair gangs, killing and wounding many of the men while they slept. The repair crews fought hard and were able to save the ship, despite suffering heavy casualties in the explosion.

2 days after the spaceship launched there was an explosion causing the Service Module portion was demolished , and that caused the crew to lose their oxygen and electricity.The supplies of the ship were only suppose to supply them for a total of 45 hours. The astronauts thought it through ,and savored supplies, using the shelter for 90 hours instead of 45. To do this, they needed to spare water for the cooling framework. The astronauts water admission was down to six ounces every day! The group lost what added up to more than 30 pounds in that short amount of time and became severely dehydrated.Truth be told,

First and foremost, an isolated oxygen tank was installed on all future ships, used only to supply the crew with oxygen to breathe. In addition, all shared oxygen tanks (tanks used for both breathing and running fuel cells) were isolated from each other, to prevent a cascading decrease in pressure in the event of a single tank failure. Next, filters and fan wiring were removed from inside the tank itself and placed on an external line. The insulation on tank electrical components was changed from teflon to stainless steel sheathed magnesium oxide. Additionally, a 400 amp hour battery was to be installed on the landing module to decrease the need for power rationing. Finally, bottled/bagged water was placed inside the cabin of the spacecraft (whereas on Apollo 13 it was located only in the landing module), to provide the crew with drinking water even in the event of a total failure of the fuel

On, April 11, 1970 Nasa launched the Apollo 13 mission to send three astronauts. To the moon , and mark the third named lunar landing. The mission aimed to send Commander Jim Lovell and lunar module pilot Fred Haise to the lunar surface while command module pilot Jack Swigert remained in orbit. But on April 13, the mission suffered a crippling explosion that would nearly doom the spaceflight and its crew. But Apollo 13 carried an oxygen tank with a troubled history. The tank had been damaged in testing, but the space craft builders were not aware of a problem. The cyclinder service module had six held the fuel tanks. Sector 4 held the damaged oxygen tank at about 56 hours into the flight of Apollo 13, Jack Swigert was instructed to “Stir

The launch went according to plan and very smoothly compared to some other launches. The first two days after the launch, Apollo 13 was the smoothest running operation that NASA has ever experienced. At almost 47 hours Joe Kerwin, the communications officer on the ground said "The spacecraft is in real good shape as far as we are concerned. We are bored to tears down here." At about 56 hours the crew of Apollo 13 had just finished a 49 minute long TV broadcast telling the people on earth how they lived and worked in a weightless environment. The spaceship was about 205,000 miles away from Earth’s surface at this point. Nine minutes after they finished the broadcast to Earth the second oxygen tank blew up which caused the first oxygen tank to blow as well. The astronauts originally thought a meteoroid had struck the ship. All communication to the ground were lost for two seconds as the astronauts tried to figure out what went wrong. The explosions of the oxygen tanks caused the electricity, water and light levels to plummet. The ship did not lose all of its light, water, and electricity it was just going through a shortage of those things. The astronauts saw that the oxygen in the second tank was completely gone, they reported this to

Everything was going smoothly until about two days into the flight. “Houston, we have a problem said Jim Lovell” At first their intention was to land on the moon, but that was all about to change. When the Apollo 13 ship’s oxygen tank ruptured the crew had to find a way to survive.

Upon landing, the captain of this flight, Captain Bob Linquist, reported to the ground engineers that the lights for the landing gear had malfunctioned and had not come on at the time of landing. The engineering crew immediately checked and came to the conclusion that the battery was weak and running low on water. The crew quickly refilled the battery and informed the captain that it would take

As if this was not bad enough, there was more disparaging news: a cloud of some sort was floating above the spacecraft, leading to the assumption that an oxygen tank exploded.

I had never heard people be happier to be cursed at. We performed a diagnostic and found out that the tank was not sealed properly and after two days of building pressure it exploded and it caused a short circuit that made the whole ship think it was dying. Luckily we still had enough water to complete the mission.

According to history.com, a weak o-ring failed to seal properly causing a fire to move up the fuselage until it reached the fuel tanks causing an explosion. It took little over a minute for the catastrophe to occur. (HISTORY.COM, n.d.). What people did not know at the time was four engineers tried to stop the launch and nearly succeeded, except NASA dismissed their concerns and the launch proceeded where by seven astronauts lost their lives (Berkes, 2016).