Essay On Apollo 13

On April 10th James “Jim” Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise embarked on one of the most historic missions in NASA history. Three days later on April 13th, while performing a routine stir on the O2 tanks, the Apollo 13 mission suffered a terrible electrical malfunction and was forced to make an emergency return mission. The movie has forever contributed two phrases to our everyday cultural vocabulary, “Houston we have a problem”, communicated by Jim Lovell, and “Failure is not an option”, voiced by Gene Kranz.

Apollo 13 launched on April 11, 1970 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crewmembers aboard the ship were James A. Lovell Jr., John L. Swigert Jr., and Fred W. Haise, Jr. Before the launch, there had been a few problems. Thomas K. Mattingly was supposed to fly on the Apollo 13 but he was exposed to the measles. He didn’t have the antibodies to fight the disease, causing him to not be able to go into space. Swigert took his place. Right before the launch, one of the technicians saw that the helium tank had a higher pressure than expected. Nothing was done to fix this. During liftoff, the second-stage engine shut down, causing the other engines to run longer than planned. Apollo 13 was off to a rocky start.

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.

Several elements were considered harmful to both Aldrin and Armstrong; therefore the safety procedure was very in depth. “Apollo was kind of nested levels of risk”, Andrew Chaikin said, author of “A Man On The Moon (1994)”. Chaikin also elaborated on what procedure the astronauts had to undertake: “You get on top of a Saturn V Rocket with enough chemical energy to be the equivalent of a small atomic bomb. Then you throw away levels of safety by going into Earth’s orbit, then going to the moon, orbiting around the moon. And then, on the landing missions, two of the guys going down to the surface and being at an absolute dead stop on the moon”. Every component of the spacecraft were tested to the maximum, this helped NASA prevail over the Soviet Union’s N1 moon rocket which was never tested before it got launched. NASA engaged “what-if thinking” to make the onboard explosion of an oxygen tank on Apollo 13 survivable. For example, the docking mechanism that linked the command module and healthy lunar module was strong enough to allow the module to propel the combined spacecraft onto the proper course for home, Chaikan said. The astronauts lived in their lunar module “lifeboat” for several days before successfully transferring back to the command module and splashing down on

Shortly after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked successfully on the Moon for the first time in history, another lunar mission almost ended in disaster without the valor and strong leadership it took to get three men back to Earth. Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks), Jack Swiggert (played by Kevin Bacon), and Fred Haise (played by Bill Paxton) blasted off on the Apollo 13 mission on April 11, 1970, in trying to collect samples from the surface of the Moon and survey it. Swiggert took the place of the more experienced Ken Mattingly (played by Gary Sinese) since Mattingly was the only one not immune to the measles after one of the other astronauts had contracted it. The flight surgeon

Apollo 13 mission to the moon was suddenly derailed, when one of the three oxygen tanks exploded, and another failing simply as collateral damage from the explosion, therefore leaving one oxygen tank for the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13. The astronauts included mission commander Jim Lovell, lunar module pilot Fred Haise and command module pilot Jack Swigert (the back-up pilot for Ken Mattingly) found themselves rotating the moon in a small confined space that was designed for only two

Lost Moon: The perilous voyage of Apollo 13, by Jeffrey Kluger and James Lovell .In April 1970 during the glory days of the Apollo space program, NASA sent navy captain Jim Lovell and two other astronauts on America’s seventh mission to the moon. Only fifty five hours into the mission when disaster struck. A mysterious explosion rocked the ship and soon its oxygen and power began to drain away. Commander Lovell and his crew watched in alarm as the cockpit grew darker, the air grew thinner, and the instruments winked out one by one.

Investigation suggested that an electrical arc had been produced in the lower equipment bay beneath Grissom’s couch. Flames fed by the pure oxygen atmosphere spread through flammable materials in the cockpit. The astronauts tried to unbolt the inward-opening hatches but had difficulty. The air pressure within the cabin was high and opening the hatches were impossible.

On April 13, 1970, NASA's Mission Control heard the five words that no control center ever wants to hear: "We've got a problem here." Jack Swigert, an astronaut aboard the Apollo 13 aircraft, reported the problem of broken down oxygen tanks to the Houston Control Center, less than two days after its takeoff on April 11th. Those at the Control Center in Houston were unsure what had happened to the spacecraft, but knew that some sort of explosion had occurred. This so-called explosion sent Apollo 13 spinning away from the Earth at 2,000 miles per hour, 75 percent of the way to the moon. In order to get the astronauts back to the

On March 24, 1970, during the countdown demonstration test for Apollo 13, Kennedy Space Center test engineers encountered a problem with an oxygen tank in the service module. The spacecraft carried two such tanks, each holding 320 pounds (145 kilograms) of supercritical oxygen. They provided the oxygen for the command module atmosphere and (along with two tanks of hydrogen) three fuel cells, which were the spacecraft's primary source of electrical power. Besides power, the chemical reaction in the cells produced water, which not only supplied the crew's drinking water but was circulated through cooling plates to remove heat from certain critical electronic components. The tanks were designed to operate at pressures of 865 to 935 pounds per square inch (psi) (6,000 to 6,450 kilopascals) and temperatures between-340 degrees F and +80

On 1st of February, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia exploded when it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere after finished a 16 days mission in space. All seven astronauts were dead because of this incident. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had stopped the space shuttle program for more than two years to investigate this tragedy. In the 16 days period, the astronauts did approximately 80 experiments on different categories, for example, life science and material science [1]. An investigation later has found out that the disaster was caused by a problem on the day that took off on 16th of January.

On April 10th James "Jim" Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise embarked on one of the most historic missions in NASA history. Three days later on April 13th, while performing a routine stir on the O2 tanks, the Apollo 13 mission suffered a terrible electrical malfunction and was forced to make an emergency return mission. The movie has forever contributed two phrases to our everyday cultural vocabulary, "Houston we have a problem", communicated by Jim Lovell, and "Failure is not an option", voiced by Gene Kranz.

The Apollo 1 flight had been scheduled for take off on February 21, 1967, an unimaginable tragedy brought those plans to a halt. During a routine pre-flight test astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger Chaffee were killed in an unforeseen and brutal fire. It all began with a strange smell, one of the men reported early

Apollo 13 is a 1995 American space adventure film directed by Ron Howard. The film depicts astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise aboard Apollo 13 for America 's third Moon landing mission. En route, an on-board explosion deprives their spacecraft of most of its oxygen supply and electric power, forcing NASA 's flight controllers to abort the Moon landing, and turning the mission into a struggle to get the three men home safely.

On the second day of their space mission the astronauts were beaming a video transmission back to earth. When they signed off, Mission Control asked the astronauts to run some routine “housekeeping” sequences to test their systems. Shortly after flipping a switch to stir the oxygen tanks there was a loud bang and an explosion. The film dramatically depicted a surge of energy running through the wires of Apollo’s circuitry system. When the electricity reached the oxygen tank there was a spark followed by an explosion. A chain reaction had begun and systems started to malfunction one after another. Warning lights lit up the control panel and alarms on board started to buzz signifying the systems shutting down.