Word: oxygenate
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Ahead lay clearly defined perils, and perhaps some uncharted ones as well, Power-or oxygen-supply failures so far from earth might well doom the astronauts. Failure of the key Service Propulsion System (SPS) at crucial junctures could send them crashing into the moon or leave them stranded in lunar orbit...
...dictum of Mao Tse-tung, guerrilla fighters must be able to live among a friendly population like fish in water. But El Fatah at that time "had no audience. Without the people to listen to us, we had no sea to swim in-the fish had no oxygen...
...retrorocket can lower their orbit into the atmosphere, where friction provides the additional braking necessary to return them to earth. In the vicinity of the moon, the astronauts might be as long as a three-day journey from home. They could fall victim to minor malfunctions -like a deteriorating oxygen supply-that would not necessarily be fatal in an earth-orbital flight...
...Charlesworth calls the mission's "longest hour." If, after completion of Apollo's tenth lunar revolution, the SPS engine fails to ignite or burns for too short a time, the astronauts would be stranded in orbit without any chance of rescue; they could live only until their oxygen supply was gone. To minimize the possibility of SPS failure, NASA has made nearly all of the engine's components redundant. If one part were to fail, a duplicate would be on hand to take over...
...befall Apollo if it hit the atmosphere at too shallow an angle. Like a flat stone skipping on water, it would bounce off the atmosphere and sail into a large elliptical orbit around the earth. Having shed Apollo's service module before reentry, the astronauts would have insufficient oxygen and electrical power to survive the several hours it might take to return to the atmosphere and land. In Phillips' laconic words, "It's a crew-loss kind of situation...