Ventiv Technology

It was just one -- of many -- routine maintenance requests. And it was the fifth time the tanks had been stirred on this particular mission. But on this occasion, when Jack Swigert flipped on the fan in Oxygen tank #2, that simple task had dire consequences for the three-man crew of Apollo 13. DEMAND, DELIVERY, DISRUPTION | 1 "We'd like you to stir up the cryo-tanks." At that time, Apollo 13 was already fifty-six hours into the flight, and their capsule was over 200,000 miles from Earth. What had begun as the third exciting journey of a moon landing had abruptly turned into a life and death struggle for survival. Engineers and technicians at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL, jumped into action. They moved the astronauts to the Lunar Module (which had its own oxygen supply), and this craft served as their home (and lifeboat) for the journey back to Earth. Husbanding their limited resources to save power and get them home, the crew successfully splashed down in the Indian Ocean four days later. Gene Kranz, NASA's Chief Flight Director, has been credited with the famous quote "Failure is Not an Option". While he never officially said that line, it is spoken by Ed Harris who played Kranz in the movie "Apollo 13". Kranz eventually titled his 2000 memoir "Failure Is Not an Option" because he liked the way it reflected the attitude of mission control. In the book, he stated that it was "a creed that we [NASA's Mission Control Center] all lived by: "Failure is not an option". Each Apollo spacecraft carried two tanks of liquid hydrogen and two tanks of liquid oxygen. The purpose of the oxygen tanks was two-fold: oxygen helped the astronauts to breathe, and it also helped power the fuel cells which in turn provided the electricity to run the many systems on the ship. "Stirring the cryogenic tanks" provided more accurate readings of how much hydrogen and oxygen gas was left on board. But on April 13, 1970, when Swigert "stirred" that oxygen tank, it ruptured with a muffled bang, effectively crippling the ship. The crew noticed something was awry almost immediately. "It looks to me that we are venting something," came the voice of mission commander Jim Lovell. "It's a gas of some sort." The capsule was rapidly losing much-needed oxygen.

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