Could You Survive Apollo 13?

Nobody said "Houston, we have a problem." What was said was in the past
tense, and the whole flight is like that.

Fifty-five hours, fifty-four minutes and fifty-three seconds after launch,
two hundred thousand miles from Earth, something in the back of your
spacecraft lets go.

You are James Lovell. You are forty-two. You have flown three times, you
went round the Moon at Christmas 1968, and at this moment you have spent more
hours in space than any other human being alive. Over the next eighty-seven
hours you will be asked to keep three men alive in a machine built to keep two
alive for forty-five, to fly a spacecraft nobody has ever trained to fly that
way, and to be told what to do by several hundred people who cannot see out of
your window.

Fifty times in this book, somebody asks you what you do next.

• An engine on the second stage quits a hundred and thirty-two seconds early
  and nobody knows why for weeks, and it is the reason the vehicle survives long
  enough to have its accident


• The air is going to run out first, and the fix is a plastic bag, some gray
  tape and a sock, and it is built on a table in Houston before it is built in
  space


• Forty-one hours after the first explosion, the lifeboat itself makes a
  noise and starts venting near its own batteries, and almost nobody has heard
  of it


• The last course correction is flown with no computer and no guidance, by
  holding the Earth still in a window, and it arrives inside a corridor two
  degrees wid

And then, twenty-four times, a transmission.

ON THE LOOP. Where a section turns on something actually said, the
book prints the exchange from NASA's own air-to-ground transcript, with its
Ground Elapsed Time and the 1970 typist's punctuation left alone. The eight
minutes of ordinary television before the bang, ending with a commander
wishing everybody a nice evening. Four and a half minutes of a landing engine
pushing a dead spacecraft, called from the ground every ninety seconds. And a
man looking out of a hatch window saying that they are venting something into
space, which is the sentence that ended the argument. And the request to stir
the cryogenic tanks, one minute and fifty-five seconds before the bang, printed
as far as the scan carries it.

The surviving scan of that transcript is damaged in places, and the book
says so, and prints nothing from a damaged line. That is why one or two
sections that plainly turn on something somebody said carry no block at
all.

Everybody comes home. That is true before you open the book and it is not
what the fifty decisions are about. What they are about is the margin: how
much battery is left when the parachutes come out, and whether the room and
the spacecraft are still one thing by hour eighty-seven.

Could You Survive Apollo 13? is the ninth book from Second Person
Press, after Ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, the Klondike,
the Blitz, the French Revolution, the Endurance, the
Titanic and the Salem Witch Trials.