Friends, it is T-26 minutes until Apollo 13 launched 50 years ago. One of NASA's finest engineering achievements was getting the 13 crew home alive. We’ll ignore the engineering failures that put them in danger to begin with (for now).

Listen “live” here: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/ 

Why did these people even bother going to the Apollo 13 launch? What were they hoping to prove or discover?

#Apollo13 #Apollo50

Well, other than Apollo 13’s second stage inboard engine cutting off early due to violent pogo oscillations, that was as uneventful a rocket launch as you could have. Especially following Apollo 12, which got struck by lightning and had everything go haywire.

I’m sure the rest of the flight will be totally normal and nothing bad will happen.

The video showing on Apollo 13 in Real-time keeps showing Ken Mattingly, sitting at the CAPCOM console assisting Joe Kerwin. Ken looked like he was in good spirits, but you really wonder what he was thinking. He was supposed to be in that ship. It worked out for him though.

I have been looking forward to Apollo 13 in Real-time for a while. Apollo 8 is my favorite Apollo mission, but 13 is the one I’ve studied most since it is the most fascinating. My desk, obviously, has a lot of Apollo 13 stuff on it.

It tends to get overlooked but the job Jack Swigert did during Apollo 13 is nothing short of magical. He stepped right into the prime crew with short notice, came in totally prepared and ready to go and did his job perfectly. Hell of a pilot. #Apollo13 #Apollo50

I think about this a lot, but it was fortuitous that Mattingly was scratched and Swigert took his place. Jack was one of the few astronauts to specifically request to be a CM Pilot and he was an expert on all its systems. He wrote many of the emergency procedures for the CM.

Jim Lovell was the best celestial navigator and most experienced astronaut in the Astronaut Corps and Jack Swigert was the leading expert in the command module’s systems. The Apollo 13 accident couldn’t have happened to a better prepared crew.

The crew originally assigned to Apollo 13 was Al Shepard, Stu Roosa and Ed Mitchell. The three ended up flying Apollo 14. Had that crew been assigned to 13 and this happened, I’m not sure it has the same ending. That crew had just 15 minutes of spaceflight experience combined.

It isn’t often that a near disaster can be considered lucky, but a lot of lucky things happened to get the 13 crew home, including the fact that the 13 crew was assigned to that mission at all. A lesser crew might not have been so well prepared to deal with the emergency.

Speaking of lucky, the accident happening 55:54 into the mission, was very lucky. Had it happened earlier, they would have needed to attempt a direct abort using the potentially damaged SPS engine. Had it happened later, they wouldn’t have had the LM to use as a lifeboat.

While we are talking about space, I should mention Yuri Gagarin. 50 years ago tonight/early tomorrow, Yuri Gagarin launched into space aboard Vostok 1, becoming the first human to travel into space. Yuri is a hero, not just of the Soviet Union, but of all mankind.

It would end up being Gagarin’s only space flight. He was backup for Soyuz 1 and knowing there were HUGE design flaws, tried to put himself on the mission instead of his friend Vladimir Komarov. Komarov refused to give up the flight because he didn’t want to risk Yuri’s life.

Soyuz 1 was a disaster. The ship had failures almost immediately and they quickly aborted the mission. During reentry, Komarov’s main parachute failed to deploy and his reserve chute tangled with the drogue. He died when his ship slammed into the earth at 40 meters per second.

After that, the USSR banned Gagarin from ever flying again because they couldn’t risk the nation’s biggest hero dying. Less than a year later, he was allowed to fly jets and he died in a plane crash. No one really knows how/why his plane crashed.

#YurisNight exists to celebrate Yuri’s flight and the importance of space flight to us as a species as a whole. The first orbital flight of the space shuttle also occurred on April 12th, and obviously Apollo 13 was flying on April 12th as well. A pretty important space day.

Yuri Gagarin was an amazing man. He was a very short, even for an astronaut, at 5’2”. He struggled landing early in his career as a pilot until his flight instructor realized he was too short to see out of the plane during landing flares and gave him a cushion to sit on.

By the time he was selected as an cosmonaut, he only had a little over 200 hours of flight time. Most Soviet pilots selected as cosmonauts were similarly inexperienced. For comparison, American pilots needed 1,000 hours of jet time to be eligible for astronaut selection.

That meant most American astronauts were relatively senior compared to their Russian counterparts. Many were field grade officers. John Glenn was a 38 year old Lieutenant Colonel with 9000 hours as a pilot in command when selected as an astronaut. Yuri Gagarin was just 25.

Sergei Korolev, the chief engineer of the Soviet Space Program took an instant liking to Yuri. Everyone did. He was loved by all. He was kind, modest, quiet, mature for his relative age and inexperience. He was also brilliant. He and Neil Armstrong were a lot of like. #YurisNight

Everyone had a pretty good idea that Gagarin would be the first of the group to fly first, but he and the others went through training simultaneously assuming they would all be primary pilot for Vostok 1. It wasn’t until 4 days before the flight that Yuri was named the pilot.

The Vostok capsule was SMALL. So small that not all of the cosmonauts could actually fit in it. Korolev specified that the cosmonaut had to be shorter than 5’7” and 159 pounds. Luckily Gagarin was tiny and didn’t even need a seat cushion!

So off he went, the first human to be launched into space. Strapped on top of a Vostok-K rocket. Imagine being the first guy to go to space. Seems normal now but we had no idea what space travel would do to the human body. Or if he’d even get to space. But off he went.

He orbited for a little over 108 minutes before returning to earth. At the time, the Russians had not yet figured out how to actually LAND their space capsules. A seemingly important part of the space travel equation but screw it let’s ride.

The Vostok capsule required the reentering cosmonaut to eject from the capsule and land using a personal parachute. First of all, NOPE. Second of all, it worked beautifully. Those Russian engineers are pretty bright. Yuri landed safely and became a hero and celebrity.

He was 27 years old. He had no college education. Now his name is remembered along with pioneers like Francis Drake, Edmund Hillary and, well, Neil Armstrong. We, as a species, were lucky to have Yuri Gagarin #YurisNight.

Every so often the Apollo 13 in Real-time has audio that is coming from… somewhere. As if it is one side of a phone call from someone still plugged into comms. It is almost always out of context and totally random. It is quickly becoming my favorite part of these.

Not long ago there was the sound of a phone ringing and a woman being upset(?) that Ken Mattingly was pulled off the flight. A few minutes ago someone was talking about coming in to work late. There is about to be a shift change in mission control as 13 coasts toward the moon.

At this point in the mission, the crew and MOCR personnel had no reason to suspect anything weird would happen. The flight was proceeding as beautifully as could be expected. In just under 50 hours, everything is going to go pear-shaped on them.