Word: descent
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps the largest audience in history watched the return, participating through TV's intimacy in every moment of the final, fiery descent. Journey's end was safe and all according to script, in sharp contrast to the crisis of mid-voyage, which had been full of unprecedented danger and breathtaking improvisation. The devastated service module, original source of the deadly hazard, peeled off properly. Aquarius, the lunar module that had served as savior instead of explorer, unzipped easily. The command unit Odyssey touched down within four miles of the U.S.S. Iwo Jima. Helicopter recovery ticked along as if automated. Soon...
...mission?during the lunar landing or afterward, when Aquarius had been discarded?the astronauts would have been doomed. The lunar module, lacking a heat shield to withstand the awesome temperatures of reentry, could not carry the crew back to the earth's surface. But its oxygen, electrical power and descent engine were vital to the safe return of Odyssey...
...could they best bring the distressed spacecraft home as quickly as possible but with a minimum of risk? A "deep-space abort"?turning the spacecraft around before it reached the moon and sending it back to earth?was obviously beyond the power of the lunar module's small descent engine. Odyssey's big propulsion engine, in the service module, was powerful enough to turn Apollo in midflight, but Houston was reluctant to try using it. Controllers were concerned that the engine might have been damaged by the accident. If it didn't work, Apollo's limited electrical power would...
...astronauts could use a small burn of the Aquarius descent engine to jog Apollo 13 back into a "free-return" trajectory, the combination of the spacecraft's velocity and lunar gravity would do the rest, slinging the ship around the moon and hurling it back on a direct course to the earth. Ironically, Apollo had been on a free-return trajectory, but its course was changed in preparation for the lunar landing...
Thus, five hours and 25 minutes after the service-module explosion, the lunar module's descent engine was fired. Had it not burned, Apollo 13 would have swung around the moon but missed the earth on the return trip by 2,951 miles and gone into a wide-ranging earth orbit, stranding the astronauts. But the lunar module engine performed reliably. With only a 30.7-second burn, it put Apollo 13 on a course that would carry it toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Houston?and the world?breathed easier, but Mission Control knew that the burn was only...