Word: oxygenate
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Apollo 13's failure ended that. The exploding oxygen tank that could easily have cost the lives of Lovell, Haise and Swigert was a cruel but perhaps necessary reminder of the fallibility of man and his machines. The cause of the malfunction will have to be established by a painstaking inquiry. Meanwhile space exploration was humanized again, as it had been during the pioneer flights and on the night when Neil Armstrong made man's first footprint in moon dust. No longer was it an issue of U.S. technocracy, or how many billions the space program costs, or what...
...less than a minute, one of the service module's two spherical oxygen tanks was completely empty; nearly 320 Ibs. of supercold ( -297° F.) oxygen, a highly pressured mix of gas and liquid, had gushed out of the spacecraft, apparently through a rupture in its thin alloy skin. Looking out of his window, Lovell could see vapor streaming by. "We are venting something into space," he reported. "It's a gas of some sort." At the same time, the spacecraft began to pitch and roll in reaction to the violent expulsion...
...command module's vital electrical power. It quickly became obvious that a moon landing was now out of the question; mission rules forbid a lunar landing if even one fuel cell becomes inoperative. The loss of two requires the earliest possible return to earth. Even worse, the second oxygen tank was now also rapidly spilling its precious cargo. Unless the venting could be stopped, there would soon be insufficient oxygen aboard Odyssey. Oxygen was essential not only for breathing; it would also be needed to react with hydrogen to produce power in the remaining?and apparently undamaged?fuel cell...
While Lovell and Haise powered up the lunar lander, Swigert battened down Odyssey. Using the service module's last few gasps of oxygen and electrical power, he charged up Odyssey's small re-entry batteries, closed off its four back-up oxygen tanks, and transferred the precise alignment of the command module's "platform"?its complex of navigational gyroscopes and accelerometers?to a similar platform in the lunar lander. These last-minute maneuvers were vital to a successful return to earth. Apollo 13 could now be navigated from the lunar module, and the command module was assured of enough...
...moment, the men seemed relatively safe. Swigert remained behind in the blacked-out command module, breathing oxygen from the lunar module through a ten-foot-long oxygen hose cannibalized from Haise's space suit. Lovell and Haise meanwhile stood guard over the lunar module's vital systems. Although Apollo 13 was still very much in trouble, there was one consolation: if the accident had to happen, it had occurred when the astronauts and Mission Control could do something about it. Had the service module become disabled later in the mission?during the lunar landing or afterward, when Aquarius had been...