It was April 13 at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. A 360-foot rocket was ready for liftoff. Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swiger were inside ready for their space adventure. The adventure to space was 240,00 miles which would take them 3 days. The Apollo 13 mission was to land on the moon and explore a hilly section called Fra Mauro to collect some 4 Billion year old rocks and sand from the moons surface to research it when they got back to earth. Everything was going fine until the astronauts heard a loud noise. It had been 55 hours and 53 minutes into the mission when an explosion happened. A faulty wiring in an oxygen tank triggered the explosion. This caused the power in the spacecraft to drain and sent some of the spaceship’s oxygen supply into space. There would be no air left and the Odyssey would die within hours. The word about the mission failure spread fast around the world. Most people thought the astronauts wouldn’t make …show more content…
The astronauts turned all power off except most critical system including the heat. Outside the temperature was 280 degrees below zero the men started shivering. Then a new problem struck, the LEM’s air filters stopped working. The air would become toxic with carbon dioxide. The astronauts used their intelligence and creativity to build a new air filter out of recycled pieces. The team was a group of fast thinkers that always stayed calm.
On Friday, April 17 Apollo 13 approached Earth. The astronauts got into the Odyssey and went through the Earth’s atmosphere. The connection with Mission Control got cut off for four minutes. They saw the sky turned red to pink and then to finally blue. The parachutes opened and the ship floated down to earth. Everyone was admired and surprised with the outcome of this mission. Even though they didn’t complete their original mission they got home safely. It was a successful
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.
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.
On July 16, 1969, NASA launched a shuttle into space containing Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin. They were going to be the first people to step foot on the Moon. This mission into the unknown caused a commotion on Earth. Many reputable news sources across the world created various sources about this event. These are weighted with the high emotions that ran through the world as well as the facts gathered as the brave men first put their footprints on the barren surface of the Moon. The creators of each peice used logos, pathos, and ethos to get the desired response from their audiences.
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.
As you grow older, you also become wiser, and the way you used to look at things also changes, and even though you regret your former actions, you will have to live with how it turned out, instead of being stuck in the past and how it could had been.
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
Just four days prior to this remarkable event, over six hundred million people watched as three brave men boarded the space module Columbia. On board were commander Neil Armstrong, lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin and command module pilot Michael Collins, all specified with the mission of performing a manned lunar landing and returning to Earth. (Smithsonian) After blasting off and
On July 20, 1969, the lunar module landed. Humanity did itself proud on that day. Until now nothing this big had ever been accomplished. The dream of traveling to the moon was already centuries old when the second World War ended in 1945. The primary objective of Apollo 11 was to complete a national goal set by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961: perform a crewed lunar landing and return to Earth. Apollo 11 would be the mission to achieve the goal that President Kennedy had laid down, with more than five months to spare before the end-of-decade deadline. On July 19, after Apollo 11 had flown behind the moon out of contact with Earth, came the first lunar orbit insertion maneuver. At about 75 hours, 50 minutes into the flight, a retrograde firing of the SPS for 357.5 seconds placed the spacecraft into an initial, elliptical-lunar orbit of 69 by 190 miles. Later, a second burn of the SPS for 17 seconds placed the docked vehicles into a lunar orbit of 62 by 70.5 miles, which was calculated to change the orbit of the CSM piloted by Collins. The change happened because of lunar-gravity perturbations to the nominal 69 miles required for subsequent LM rendezvous and docking after completion of the lunar landing. Before this second SPS firing, another TV transmission was
Earth is our own spaceship regulated not by circuits that can short but by organisms, the sun, and our atmosphere which can be threatened. Apollo 13 itself was the pre-eminent message of what can happen when in fact planet Earth runs into its own complicated “shorts.” However, if Earth become uninhabitable there nowhere to fly to and take refuge from outer space and all its lethality. Odum recognizes, “So far, all attempts to build a large bioregenerative life-support system that would support a large number of people in space without a supply “umbilical cord” to earth, have failed.” When the greenhouse gases, nuclear waste, and chemicals kill our complex life support system that we as humans do not fully understand, there will be nowhere left for humanity.
At this point, there was enough oxygen in the second system to get the astronauts home safely, but Lovell, one of the astronauts, noticed that the psi (pounds per square inch) level on the pressure gauge for the second system was falling as well. It should normally register at 860, now it was only a 300, only 53 minutes after the initial explosion. At this pace, the spacecraft would expend all of its oxygen and electricity between midnight and 3 AM. This was not giving the Control Center a lot of time.
I watched the movie Apollo 13. This movie was about the Americans making yet another trip to the moon. For the astronauts that were going to the moon, it was a very powerful time for them. It was a goal that they had been working on getting to all of their lives. When they were in space, problems began to arise. The four men soon realized that they were not going to take that special step on the moon. Instead, they had to fight for their life to get their ship back to earth. In the end, they barely made it back home, but back home they were to see their families yet again.
The Apollo 11 mission was a huge accomplishment, not only for the United States, but for the entire future of space exploration. The mission impacted the world as we know it, and opened up a whole new realm for us to explore. Apollo 11 was a massive undertaking many thought would never succeed, but now it could be considered the most memorable space experience of all time. Because of its magnitude, many writers wrote about the mission. The writers of that time wrote about the chance for disaster, the jaw dropping launch, the first steps on the moon, and the controversy that surrounded the first mission to the moon.
The Apollo program had the primary objective to land a Human on the moon as proposed by the President of the United States in 1961, John F. Kennedy (Logsdon, 2015). However, during the program, various problems had occurred, notably the Apollo 6 launch which experienced the premature shut down of two engines during the second stage and thus changing the trajectory of the spacecraft (Saturn V Flight Evaluation Working Group, 1968). The Apollo 6 mission, an unmanned mission, had faced various technical issues that had changed the outcome of the mission that was originally planned; the structure of the spacecraft had experienced ‘‘pogo oscillation’s’ after the launch, the spacecraft had also experienced faulty structural integrity as panels had been detached during launch, two of the engines during the second stage had shut down (Williams, 2017). This
from an explosion in the oxygen tanks due to some faulty wiring that cut the spacecraft’s
Over the past 48 years, there has been quite a bit of controversy and speculation about the Apollo 11 moon landing. This supposedly was the first time the United States successfully sent two people, mission commander Neil Armstrong, and his pilot Buzz Aldrin, to the moon. The two men spent 21 hours and 36 minutes of the moon's surface, and steaked the American flag on the moon. They also had photographs and video footage taken of them by NASA. These photos caused many people and also many conspiracy theorist, to look deeper into these doubtful images.