All of these indicators must, of course, be examined in greater detail. One conclusion that we can draw, primarily because of the electrical anomalies and pressure and temperature rise just prior to the No. 2 oxygen tank failure, is that this event was not caused by a meteorite. From the preliminary examination it does appear that the observed rapid rise in oxygen tank No. 2 pressure would require an amount of heat much greater than that produced from electrical current flow for the tank fans, heaters, and instrumentation operation. This does not rule out electrical power as a source of initiation for some other energy source as yet undetermined. Analysis and tests have been and are being conducted to determine what such an energy source could be and how it could have been initiated.

EXPECT EARLY RESOLUTION OF PROBLEM

In parallel with the above analysis, intensive effort is underway to determine what corrective actions might be taken to modify the oxygen system and associated hardware to eliminate the possible cause or causes that led to the oxygen tank failure. Final action must await the completion of the failure investigation.

I am confident that the actions currently underway will lead to an early resolution of the problem that caused the termination of the Apollo 13 mission.

I would like to conclude my remarks with a few comments on the performance of the Apollo hardware and the flight and ground crew. The actions taken to bring Apollo 13 safely home demonstrated under

extremely adverse conditions the inherent flexibility that has been developed into the Apollo systems and operations. The flexibility of the spacecraft systems provided us with many different options from which we selected a series of configurations in meeting the varying requirements on the trip home. This long, arduous voyage continuously presented the challenge to balance the spacecraft systems required to perform necessary functions against the availability of consumables of water, electrical power, oxygen, and the lithium hydroxide to remove the carbon dioxide. The options available to flight and ground crews in every case permitted acceptable courses of action to be selected. During this emergency situation, the remaining systems performed in an outstanding manner in meeting the unusual demands placed upon them. At the same time, the flight and ground crews demonstrated exceptional competence in meeting a set of unusual

circumstances.

In the preparation cycle for each Apollo mission, much of the flight and ground crew effort is spent in reviewing and improving the plans and established procedures to handle contingency situations. Verification of and proficiency in handling these procedures is developed through simulations involving the flight crew in spacecraft simulators and the flight controllers at their consoles in the Mission Control Center. However, the depth to which this contingency effort can proceed must be limited to some practical bound. The point I must emphasize is that the mission planning and training develops not only specific contingency procedures, but much more importantly, a team of people with the capability to respond to unexpected events during manned space missions. To show how this capabilitiy was employed, Mr. Glynn Lunney will summarize the actions taken by this team which resulted in a successful recovery of Apollo 13 1 week ago today. The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Lunney?

STATEMENT OF GLYNN S. LUNNEY, APOLLO 13 MISSION DIRECTOR

Mr. LUNNEY. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, personally, as a member or a representative of the Mission Control Center team, and that is a lot of men and women, I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to report on how we conducted the Apollo 13 flight. I would like to preface my remarks by referring to the status that we are in in the course of the Apollo program today. We have had a number of flights; we have had a number of flights to the moon. The Apollo 9 flight was the first flight where we had a man check out the lunar module, and that was done in earth orbit last winter. We had a series of tests conducted to first verify that the lunar module would do its job at the moon, and secondly, we operated in a number of fashions, the applications of which lent themselves to the problem that we had in Apollo 13.

LUNAR MODULE AS LIFEBOAT

Secondly, when we started flying to the moon with the lunar module on Apollo 10, we recognized that the lunar module ship provided lifeboat facility for the astronauts in case we got into serious problems. We have paid a lot of attention to that in our planning. We made

a number of preparations. Most of the preparations are prepared in a general sense and it is difficult to try to cover all of the cases on the way out and the way back. But we had put the personnel through the discipline in thinking that out in order to respond to that kind of problem were we ever to run into one.

With those remarks, let me go through what will of necessity here this morning be a rather sketchy outline of what we were going through in the control center. Then I think you will hear from the pilots' points of view how this worked out.

The first slide (fig. 6) very simply describes the mission we were in. In earth to moon, we were on the familiar figure 8 maneuver. We were on this trajectory called hybrid transfer maneuver, the dotted line-we had left the free-return trajectory, which is the dashed linearound the moon and back to earth. The start of the problem occurred about 180,000 miles away from the earth, at about 55 hours, 55 minutes. (See fig. 7.)

Very briefly, a summary of events from that time on. It started with a report of the problem from the astronauts. What I have summarized for you here are a number of steps that we have considered important ones, both in deciding things and executing things that have had to be performed to successfully complete the flight.

After the problem, which went through a series of stages that could be described as an increasing awareness of the extent of the problem and the seriousness of it, in about an hour and a half, both the ground controllers and the crew had decided that it was time to go into the lunar module to prepare that ship for the lifeboat technique which we had discussed over the years in preparing for these flights, as I said earlier

We also did, something else shortly after the crew entry into the lunar module which transferred the guidance alinement from the command module into the lunar module. We actually used some of the precious battery power to do that, but we felt that if we did, that we had something which would then permit the pilots to do propulsion. We were not on a free-return path flight to the earth so we did want to get a platform alinement.

At about 58:40 we powered down the command module. The oxygen was about gone and we turned off the power drawn from the command module batteries to save them for the return portion of the flight.

We had a number of courses available to us. We actually had the lunar module powered up. We could do a midcourse relatively soon and get back on a free return. We did have one option which did not get very serious consideration. It had to do with doing a direct return abort to the earth, but that would have required a tremendous amount of