Next came the splashdown, which I guess for the people in our business has to be one of the most beautiful sights in the world. That concludes my remarks.

The CHAIRMAN. Now we are going to have a chance to meet an old friend. Captain Lovell, I hope you and Mr. Swigert will start by rising and facing the people in the audience.

STATEMENTS OF ASTRONAUTS JAMES A. LOVELL, COMMANDER OF APOLLO 13; AND JOHN L. SWIGERT JR., COMMAND MODULE PILOT OF APOLLO 13

Astronaut LOVELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. [Applause.]

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I thought today that Jack and I would informally tell you what went on in the spacecraft during the flight of Odyssey and Aquarius. Dr. Petrone and Glynn Lunney have covered pretty thoroughly all the varied details. But there were certain emotional factors and techniques which I thought might be interesting to you.

Actually, the flight began several says before we lifted off. This flight was somewhat unusual in the fact that we had a rather minor crisis in the crew at the time. One of our backup crew members came down with the measles and in examining the primary crew, we found out that Lt. Comdr. Ken Mattingly was susceptible to the disease. It was quite a dramatic decision that we should not fly Ken, in case he did come down with the disease during the flight. We then looked at the backup crew-and Jack was backup. In the last 2 days prior to the flight, Jack, Fred Haise, and myself worked close together-to be sure that we did work as a team. To prepare for space flights, it is very difficult for the backup and the prime crews to get together because there are so many details to take care of ourselves that cross training is somewhat limited. But I am happy to report that as we made the decision to go in April with Jack, Jack did an outstanding job and we are very proud of how he worked in with the prime team.

REPORT OF LOW MORALE COMPLETELY FALSE

There was one other aspect to our training which I would like to report. It had been mentioned previously that I thought the morale at the Cape was low and that I was worried about the booster and the spacecraft and the people there. This is completely false. I think one of the little sidelights, one of the little jobs that we have as a crew besides training for ourselves is to go around and talk to the people there. I am happy to report that the crew people, the support team, everybody that was connected with the flight of Apollo 13, were competely behind us and completely enthusiastic about the approaching flight. I had no qualms whatsoever on April 11 to step in that spacecraft and undertake the mission.

I would like to set the scene as we saw it from the spacecraft at just about 55 hours, as Dr. Petrone had mentioned. Up to that time, our flight was rather normal. We had proceeded along the flight plan and were actually ahead of it. So we requested from ground control to enter the lunar module Aquarius 3 hours earlier. There

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was some work that Fred Haise and I had to do and we were also scheduled to turn on our television to show the people back home on the ground some interior photography of the vehicles. We had done that. We were just completing our television work. I had been operating the camera. I was moving back through the tunnel, and Fred was still in the lunar module, just about ready to close the hatch. Jack was in the command module on the left-hand seat, when we heard a rather large explosion.

In the testing of a lunar module, there is a valve which we actuate during this procedure which also gives out this same loud noise. I had forgotten the amount of noise from this valve which rather unnerved us a bit. We thought perhaps this was a repeat of the same test. But it turned out, as I saw Fred's face as he looked down through the tunnel, that he had nothing to do with this explosion.

About that time, I looked at Jack. Jack started to see some of the warning lights come on and I think that I will let Jack explain what he saw at that time.

SUMMARIZES ACTION AFTER EXPLOSION

Astronaut SWIGERT. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, shortly after the explosion-of course, in space, there is no air, so there is no sound; the sound itself was transmitted by the structure. Since I was attached to the seat with a lap belt, I did feel a small shudder with the explosion. At about 2 seconds thereafter, we had a master alarm and a main bus-B undervoltage light which comes on when the main bus goes under 261⁄2 volts. I had some immediate concern because we had an unexplained problem at the main bus during testing. I transmitted that we had a problem and immediately got over to the right-hand seat to look at the readings of the voltage and the current.

At this time, the main bus voltage was normal. The current was lo w and fuel cell 3 was normal, which indicated to me that whatever it was, it was transitory.

At that time, being a command module pilot, I had an awful lot of faith in the command module and I thought it was in the LM. They were sitting in there without a hatch. So I said, "Jim, we had better get the hatch in and then let's sit back and take a look at what we have."

I started preparations to install the hatch, which is in the command module to close off the tunnel area. Fred Haise had come down from the tunnel at this time and looked into his seat over on the right hand side and began looking at the remaining indicators. At this time, main bus B voltage was off scale low, so it was somewhere less than 23 volts. The current was zero and the fuel cell 3 was zero, which gave indication that fuel cell 3 had stopped putting out and we indeed had no voltage and no current on main bus B.

Shortly thereafter, as Fred started transferring some of the load from that bus onto our remaining good bus, he had a main bus A undervoltage. This caused him to look at the fuel cells that were powering the main bus A, fuel cells 1 and 2. He did notice that on fuel cell 1, the flow was also zero.

At this point in time, Jim looked out the side of the spacecraft and saw material venting from the spacecraft into space and appearing much like a snowfall in some of our Western States during the winter. We concluded then that the problem indeed was in the service module and we terminated our efforts to install the hatch and began working with the ground to isolate the loss of oxygen which we had determined from our quantity indicators was coming from tank No. 2, and since the pressure was decreasing, we also were losing oxygen from tank No. 1.

I think that pretty well summarizes it.

The CHAIRMAN. Before you stop, would you mind turning around to the audience and giving them a Rocky Mountain wave? [Applause.]

DESCRIBES FEELINGS OVER SITUATION

Astronaut LOVELL. You might wonder just what our feelings were about this time. The situation went from one where we anticipated that our lunar landing mission itself, this landing on the moon, might be in jeopardy, to one of whether we would be able to return back home or not. The seriousness of the situation increased greatly in the few minutes during our analysis of what was going on. To summarize our situation from the crew point of view, we were losing three fuel cells. These fuel cells produce the electrical power to get us back home. The batteries in the command module itself were not sufficient. We were at the same time losing oxygen pressur in our two oxygen tanks. When I looked at them, one was zero, one was going down rapidly. It is here that the coordination, I thought, between the ground and the crew was admirable. They analyzed the situation and we soon realized that our only hope of survival was to go into Aquarius, power up its systems, and use the systems and the consumables on board the lunar module for the return home. It was here that we realized that it was now a case of survival.

We did this. We powered up the lunar module, and the first milestone of coming home, as Mr. Lunney has said, was to get an alinement that we were slowly going to lose from the command module and place that alinement into the lunar module. We were on a trajectory that, had we not done anything, would have entered us into a permanent orbit, maybe 230 miles apogee, probably 100 perigee. So the ground crew gave us what we needed to get through and get a free return trajectory burn and get us back.

My main concern at this point was to get this spacecraft back within the earth's atmosphere. I felt that this would be a much better termination of this flight at least to come back into the atmosphere than it would have been to not come back at all.

TRANSFER SPACECRAFT CONTROL TO LUNAR MODULE

One of the problems which we had to face as we entered the lunar module was the fact that we do not normally control this complete stack by the systems in the lunar module. We fly basically by the command module, the cone-shaped spacecraft, in the center of this model. Consequently, we had to transfer the control of the spacecraft

to the lunar module and use these thrusters. We had practiced this, fortunately, in our training and found out that with the termination of a translation controller, which is normally used to move the lunar module in the translation, plus the attitude controller, we could control this entire stack. Remember now that we have a service module that had almost full fuel plus the reaction control system or attitude that was almost in full fuel.

Our first burn with the help of the ground was successful. We were back on free return. At the same time, we were trying to determine just how much in the way of consumables we had on board the spacecraft. This was a problem that concerned me. I knew that if this engine worked properly, we could make it back as far as the trajectory was concerned, because we had done this before in simulation and Jim McDivitt and the crew on Apollo 9 had actually tested this out. But I did not have at my fingertips at the moment just how much consumables we had on board and whether we could last the return voyage.

Again the ground came through. They computed for us, and I must give Fred Haise some credit, too, because he had in the back of his mind what the situation was and he thought he would keep them honest by checking out to see what we actually had to see whether the ground was going to give us the true figure or not. When Fred said that we had about an hour to spare, I felt a little bit more relieved. Our second milestone was just after we passed the moon and we got to within 130 or 140 miles of the lunar surface. As we went through the back side, even with the emergency going on-and since I had been there before, I was anxious to get this second maneuver out of the way-but Jack and Fred managed to pick up a few more photographs for scientific development and exploration. So I finally had to turn them away from the windows so we could get on with the burn. The second burn was important because it increased or decreased the time of transit from the moon back to the earth. Again, we used the descent propulsion engine. At this time, since Jack had completely powered down the command module, he was the third member aboard the LM and helped us out in our maneuvers as we lit off the engine and made a very successful automatic burn to decrease our time coming home.

Jack, why don't you comment a few minutes on just what our environmental system was as we tried to power down the lunar module?

COMMENTS ON ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEM

Astronaut SWIGERT. Let me just state now, we have an active vehicle up here, completely passive around here [indicating]. One of the things that was unusual is that when you are right side up in the lunar module, you are upside down in the command module. So when you go from one area to another, there is a period of acclimitization. The lunar module with its systems powered was warm. We of course had no power in the command module and as time went on, it kept getting colder and colder. We did use the command module for sleeping for the first 2 days. It allows you a place to stretch out, it has sleep restraints that you can attach to the spacecraft structure and the sleeping accommodations were very comfortable until it got too cold for sleeping. Then we were all together in a group in the lunar module, as crowded as it was.