Apollo 13's crew got home using a lunar lander as a lifeboat.
Two days into the flight to the Moon in April 1970, an oxygen tank exploded and crippled Apollo 13's main spacecraft. The three astronauts retreated into their small lunar lander, built for two people for two days, and swung around the Moon to get home. Duct tape played a starring role.
Apollo 13 launched on 11 April 1970, meant to be the third crewed Moon landing, with Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise aboard. Swigert was a late substitute for Ken Mattingly, who had been exposed to rubella. On 13 April, US time, Mission Control asked for a routine stir of the oxygen tanks. Seconds later the crew heard a loud bang. Swigert radioed, 'Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here,' and Lovell repeated it. The line was later shortened in the 1995 film to 'Houston, we have a problem'.
The explosion emptied both oxygen tanks in the service module. The spacecraft's fuel cells needed that oxygen to make electricity, so the command module had to be shut down to save its batteries for re-entry. The crew moved into the lunar module, Aquarius. It was designed to support two men on the Moon for two days; Mission Control improvised ways to stretch it to three men for four, through a cold, damp journey with little drinking water.
One crisis nearly undid the rest. The lander's canisters for scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air were too few, and the spare ones from the command module were a different shape. Engineers on the ground devised an adapter from plastic covers torn from manuals, duct tape and other items on board, and read the instructions to the crew over about an hour. Nicknamed 'the mailbox', it worked straight away. The crew splashed down safely in the Pacific on 17 April.
The investigation traced the disaster back years. Thermostatic switches in the tank were rated for 28 volts but were exposed to 65 volts during ground testing, failed, and let the tank's heater get hot enough to damage wire insulation inside it. When the fan was switched on in space, the damaged wiring ignited. Later missions got a redesigned tank.
Source: Wikipedia — Apollo 13 · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
