Post-Mortem on Apollo 13

I'M afraid this is going to be the last moon mission for a long time," radioed Apollo 13's commander shortly after one of his spacecraft's vital oxygen tanks exploded. Last week, safely back in Houston, Jim Lovell and his crewmates took a far more cheerful view. "I foresee that we can get this incident over with," Lovell said, "and can charge ahead." The space agency shared his optimism. Despite Apollo's close brush with disaster, NASA officials seem more determined than ever to continue exploration of the moon.

Explosive Force. They are counting on help from a high-level review board, chaired by Edgar M. Cortright Jr., director of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. After ordering a schedule of 14-hour work days, Cortright predicted that an explanation for the mysterious blast in Apollo's service module would soon be found--perhaps within three or four weeks. The investigators--including Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon --will be extremely busy. During the six-day voyage, Apollo 13 radioed back more than 7,000,000 feet of taped data, all of which will have to be carefully combed for clues to the mishap. In addition, the board will have to examine the films and still photographs brought back by the astronauts.

Cortright's investigators are looking into all conceivable causes of the explosion. But most top NASA officials already think that the blast was probably the result of a defect in one of the two double-walled oxygen tanks. Under the extremes of pressure (920 lbs. per sq. in.) and temperature (-297DEG F.) inside the tanks, they say, a fragment of metal--perhaps a rivet or a piece from an internal cooling fan--could have flaked off. As this chip sheared away, there may have been a spark or another kind of combustion, Dr. Rocco Petrone, director of the Apollo program, told Congress at week's end. The additional heat would have caused the oxygen to expand, and perhaps build up pressure in the tank to the point where the gas burst out with explosive force.

A preliminary study of the telemetry tapes has already shown that oxygen pressure in one of the tanks rapidly increased 90 seconds before the accident. Unfortunately, the rise was not observed on the ground, Flight Director Gene Kranz told TIME Correspondent Leo Janos last week. Reason: So much data streams into Houston from a spacecraft that flight controllers monitor only a certain number of critical functions at any single moment; the signals for the others are simply stored on tape for later examination. Furthermore, Kranz explained, even if some hawk-eyed observer had spotted the wild pressurization, his first incredulous reaction would probably have been to check for a malfunctioning sensor. Finally, no matter how quickly he responded, there was really nothing he could do. The pressure, Kranz said, simply built up too fast to be stopped.

Even so, Mission Control knew more about Odyssey's serious plight than Apollo 13's crew did. "We were only a few feet away," Lovell told a televised news conference, "but the people on the ground had a lot more information via telemetry than we had concerning pressures and temperatures and possible causes of the accident." Kranz's and Lovell's comments underscore the terrible complexities and dangers of space flight. The hard fact is, there are almost unlimited possibilities for equipment failures aboard spacecraft far from earth.

Martian Microbe. Though the effort to reduce the likelihood of such failures could delay next October's flight of Apollo 14, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine thinks that the moon program can be kept on schedule. Indeed, the space agency got some rare encouragement to press ahead with Apollo from an often critical scientific community. Reporting puzzling age differences in lunar dust gathered at the Ocean of Storms and at the Sea of Tranquillity, Caltech Geologist Gerald Wasserburg made a strong plea at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union for continued manned lunar exploration. "The moon," he told the Washington conference, "will surely prove to be the cornerstone of our understanding of planetary evolution."

Some Congressmen may be harder to convince. Far more interested in terrestrial problems, these critics are cool toward both the moon program and deeper manned probes into space. Apollo 13's flight cost $380 million. And the flight's failure has made them even more dubious about space exploration. "I cannot justify approving moneys to find out whether or not there is some microbe on Mars," complained Manhattan Democrat Edward Koch, a member of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, "when in fact I know there are rats in Harlem apartments."

Still, most Congressmen continue to favor the space effort. Overriding a White House recommendation, the House last week tentatively tacked an extra $265 million onto NASA's 1971 budget, bringing it to a total of $3.6 billion.

The vote (229 to 105) was far closer than expected. But California Democrat George Miller, the science committee chairman, apparently reflected majority sentiment when he said: "The sympathies and interest generated by this flight, both in this country and around the world, cannot be sold down the river."

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