Apollo 13 Team Believes Mission Guided by ‘Divine Providence’

By Bob Granath

In the moments following Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell’s report, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” things happened fast. Lovell and his crewmates, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, worked with the team in Mission Control to sort out the issues facing the mission. But, key members of that effort believe they also were aided by a Higher Power.

Launched April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 was to be America’s third Moon landing mission. Two days into the flight, an oxygen tank exploded in the command-service module’s (CSM’s) electricity-producing fuel cell system. Apollo 13 was 205,000 miles from Earth.

About 15 minutes after the first sign of a problem, Lovell peered outside.

“Looking out the hatch (window), we are venting something,” he said. “We are venting something out into space. It’s a gas of some sort.”

It was a gas – oxygen. The fuel cells combined super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to generate electricity. Due to the failure, the CSM, called “Odyssey,” was losing power fast. The lunar module (LM) that was to take Lovell and Haise to the Moon’s surface was “Aquarius.”

As the flight control team scrambled to understand the problem, flight director Gene Kranz instructed them to follow their training.

“OK, let’s everybody keep cool,” he said. “Let’s solve the problem, but let’s not make it any worse by guessing.”

Then Kranz added a key reminder.

“We got the LM still attached,” he said. “The LM spacecraft is good if we need it to get back home.”

Lunar Module ‘Lifeboat’

When the “Lunar Orbit Rendezvous” mode using the spacecraft for Apollo Moon landings was chosen in 1962, discussions were conducted about using the LM as a lifeboat if the CSM become disabled.

Read more about using two spacecraft for Apollo missions.

However, by 1964 a NASA study at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) in Houston concluded that using the LM as lifeboat should not be necessary. The report determined no single reasonable CSM failure could be identified that would prohibit use of the spacecraft’s big service propulsion system engine.

“Naturally, I’m glad that view didn’t prevail, and I’m thankful that by the time of Apollo 10 (in 1969), the first lunar mission carrying the LM, the LM as a lifeboat was again being discussed,” Lovell wrote in “Apollo Expeditions to the Moon” published by the agency’s Scientific and Technical Information Office in 1975.

As tension mounted in Mission Control about 45 minutes after the explosion, Seymour “Sy” Liebergot recommended that the crew begin exercising that LM lifeboat option.

“You’d better think about getting (the crew) into the LM,” said Liebergot who went by the call sign EECOM for Electrical, Environmental and COMunications systems.

Spacecraft communicator, known as cap com (capsule communicator) Jack Lousma, a fellow astronaut, notified the crew.

“We’re starting to think about the LM lifeboat,” he said.

“Yes,” command module pilot Swigert said. “That’s what we’re thinking about, too.”

‘You’ve got 15 minutes‘

Lousma warned Lovell and lunar module pilot Haise that time was running short.

 “We figure we’ve got about 15 minutes’ worth of power left in the command module,” Lousma said, “so we want you to start getting over in the LM and getting some power on.”

“Fred and I quickly floated through the tunnel, leaving Jack to perform the last chores in our forlorn and pitiful CSM that had seemed such a happy home less than two hours earlier,” Lovell wrote.

Shortly after the Ron Howard film “Apollo 13” premiered in 1995, I spoke with Haise. At the time, he was president of Grumman Technical Services, Inc. as part of the Shuttle Processing Contract Team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. I asked him how he was able to get Aquarius ready in 15 minutes when it normally takes at least an hour. As heroes often do, he acknowledged someone else.

“Credit really should go to Jay Honeycutt,” he said.

In mid-1995, Honeycutt was into his first year as center director at Kennedy. However, most of his career was spent in Houston. During the Apollo Program, he was chief of the Vehicle Simulation Section of Flight Operations and simulation supervisor, or sim-sup, for lunar landings. He helped lead the group that trained astronaut crews and members of the flight control team for the Apollo missions.

“We took their procedures and their flight rules and their malfunction procedures, and would write training exercises to put problems in the routine operation of the control center,” Honeycutt said during an interview for NASA’s Oral History Project in March 2000. “(This would) force them to work together to solve a problem with the flight crew so the ground and the flight team could learn to work problems together.”

As Haise explained, that training paid off – big time.

“Our last full-up simulation was about a week before launch,” he said. “Jim, Jack and I were in the mission simulator and the flight control team was at their consoles in Mission Control.”

Honeycutt came in early the day of that simulation. He told his team, known as “gremlins,” what his plan was for the day. The assistants were given their moniker as they programed computers to both simulate a portion of the mission and they also inserted data to mimic failures that the team would work through.

A Fortunate Coincidence?

“The failure they gave us was one that required using the LM as a lifeboat,” Haise said. “That’s how I was able to power up the LM in 15 minutes. I’d practiced it a few days before launch during that simulation.”

My response was, “Of all the hundreds of scenarios he (Honeycutt) could have chosen . . .”

Haise interrupted, “No, not hundreds, thousands,” he said. “Out of thousands of possible scenarios he could have chosen.”

Was it just a fortunate coincidence?

In October 2000, I conducted a VIP tour of the Florida spaceport for Gene Kranz and his wife, Marta. As we drove from the Space Shuttle’s Orbiter Processing Facility to Launch Pad 39B, I asked him about that apparent happenstance.

“You know, sometimes you just have to chalk something up to Divine Providence,” he said. “We were in God’s hands.”

In 1997. Kranz spoke to a meeting of the Cape Canaveral Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and made a similar point. The AIAA is a professional society for the field of aerospace engineering.

In his presentation, Kranz spoke about his decision to use the propulsion system on the LM for the trip back to Earth. The CSM’s service propulsions system engine was far more powerful and could have shaved a couple of days off the return trip. Using the LM’s decent propulsion system engine required taking time to loop around the Moon. That would stretch the limits of consumables such as power and oxygen.

“But I couldn’t get comfortable using the command-service module’s engine in case it had been damaged by the explosion,” Kranz told his audience. “Not everyone in the Flight Control Room agreed with me. My boss, Chris Kraft, was one who did.”

Kraft was NASA’s original flight director and at the time of Apollo 13, was deputy director of the Houston space center. He always emphasized to those in Mission Control to follow what they were taught in simulations.

“Be very careful how you make decisions, because if you jump to the end, the sims taught you how devastating that could be,” Kraft said. “You could do wrong things and not be able to undo them.”

The Right Decision

“I wondered if I made the right decision (of using the LM’s engine) until the crew was preparing for reentry,” Kranz said to the AIAA gathering. “After the damaged service module was discarded, I heard the crew’s description.”

“There’s one whole side of that spacecraft missing,” said Lovell after the service module was jettisoned. “Right by the high gain antenna, the whole panel is blown out, almost from the base to the engine.”

Haise added, “Yes, it looks like it got to the SPS (service propulsion system engine) bell, too.”

“Then I knew I’d made the right decision,” Kranz said. “I believe I was guided by Divine Providence.”

Haise echoed similar thoughts speaking to a community prayer breakfast at Indian River City United Methodist Church in Titusville, Florida, during the fall of 1995.

“We definitely felt the power of prayers being offered by so many people back here on Earth,” he said. “It was comforting.”

Looking back on the Apollo era, Honeycutt shared the “can-do” spirit often expressed by those who were a part of the team that sent astronauts to the Moon.

“By golly, in the Apollo Program we thought we were invincible,” he said in August 2004. “I mean, our attitude was ‘We’ve got to do this, and ain’t nobody gonna stop us, and there’s no chance that we’re going to fail.'”

The Gene Kranz signature and comment on an envelope commemorating the launch of Apollo 13 summed it up best, “With God’s Help & A Great Team.”

Click here to read more about Apollo 13 — NASA’s “Finest hour.”

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