Word: spacecrafts
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...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...
Aquarius responded well, but mission planners were still faced with a number of agonizing decisions. How 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...
...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...
...only 38 hours. Again Mission Control decided not to risk firing a possibly damaged engine. If, on the other hand, the 26-ton service module were jettisoned after rounding the moon, a long burn of the small Aquarius descent engine would impart about the same velocity to the lightened spacecraft, setting it down in the South Atlantic in less than 40 hours. But that strategy too carried unnecessary risks. It would so deplete the LM's fuel supply that later course corrections might not be possible. Also, loss of the service module would expose the command module's heat shield...
Inside the darkened spacecraft, the astronauts struggled to make the best of their dangerous predicament. While two slept fitfully in the unpowered and chilly command module, the third remained on watch "downstairs" in the lunar module. Ground controllers had at least one bit of cheering news. To the delight of scientists, the Saturn third-stage S-4B rocket (which itself had been aimed toward the moon after giving Apollo its final boost) had hit the lunar surface exactly as planned. Its impact created a reverberation that registered for four hours on the Apollo 12 Ocean of Storms seismometer. "Well...