byTerry Floyd

APOLLO 13 is the newest film from director Ron Howard. We saw it on Independence Day, an appropriately patriotic way to celebrate the occasion. The film does a fine job of recreating the period of the early 1970s, a time I remember quite well. Like a lot of sf fans, I was intently interested in the space program, and followed it closely, probably the only part of the daily newscasts to which I paid much attention. The film took me back to that time just before I turned 12 years old, the "Golden Age of Science Fiction." I'd just discovered Heinlein and was rapidly devouring every book in our school library that bore his name. I was also very fond of Alan E. Nourse, Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. Because of my interest in space exploration, my mother had ordered a subscription to the Science Service's program of space modules for me, a bimonthly treat when the box arrived with new scientific booklets from one of NASA's public relations offices, written for elementary and high-school students, and every now and then, plastic scale model kits of the Saturn V booster, Apollo Command module and LEM craft which I eagerly constructed and tested in my bedroom flight simulator. Consequently, the concept of a manned mission to the moon was not beyond my understanding. In fact, I'd wondered why it had taken so long.

In 1947, during the pre-production phase of George Pal's film DESTINATION MOON, Heinlein himself predicted that we'd be launching unmanned probes to luna before 1955, and manned missions less than ten years later. Well, lots of us were optimists, weren't we? It took a bit longer than that, of course, but we did accomplish Kennedy's goal of a manned moon landing within ten years. Now that the space program has sort of stalled in its tracks while marching in step to the PC trend of the 90's, "searching for its identity," many of the early astronauts have written their memoirs and revealed just how miraculous the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs really were, considering that the vehicles they flew were slapped together in ridiculous haste in a foolhardy "race" to beat the Soviet Union to the lunar surface. It's truly amazing that more lives weren't lost to NASA than those of Chaffee, White and Grissom in the disastrous Apollo 1 fire. The documentary series Moonshot includes a recording of one of the last sentences spoken by the Apollo 1 astronauts before their fiery deaths, while trying to iron out a radio problem. Gus Grissom had to repeat the phrase three times before the control crew deciphered what he was saying: "Come again, Gus?" they asked. "I said, 'How can we expect to get to the moon if we can't even communicate between two buildings?'" But each accident taught the engineers more lessons in how much they'd overlooked that, in hindsight, should have been perfectly obvious.

What astounded me most about APOLLO 13 was how primitive their technology seems today, yet that awkward design, held together by little more than krazy glue, rubber bands and prayer, still got us to the moon and back more than half a dozen times (counting the orbital flights as well as the landings), with only one major glitch encountered on unlucky 13. But good god, it was one helluva glitch, and highlighted an entire sequence of blunders that, had the public or congress been paying attention at all, could have so discredited the program to the point where moon missions might have ended right then and there.

It's absolutely astounding that the Apollo design even made it in the first place, much less repeated the feat as frequently it did. The Soviet Zond design -- less elaborate, but equally functional and brilliant in its own way -- might have done the job just as well, but after NASA had accomplished the feat, it seemed entirely too costly a public relations risk for the Soviets to take unless Murphy's law had somehow been repealed. The brave cast of Heinlein's DESTINATION MOON had less difficulty reaching their goal than did the hapless crew of Apollo 13. And as with DESTINATION MOON, the real challenge was not just getting to the moon, but returning to the earth safely.

The film shows NASA ground crews calculating reentry trajectories and CO2 level projections using pencils, paper and slide rules. Remember, this was 1970, some years before the first hand-held calculator became feasible. The Apollo 13 crew must do the same, since their computers were intended for other vital tasks, and a few simple mathematical functions accessible to the crew had been somehow overlooked in the design process. Likewise, CO2 filters in the Command Module were cylindrical, while those in the Lunar Excursion Module were square, and thus were incompatible with each other. The crew had to improvise a device using duct tape, a plastic bag, a notebook cover, some tubing and a sock to scrub their precious air supply into breathability. That ugly little lifesaving box now sits on display at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, a testament to the Heinlein-hero boy scout ingenuity that fueled the space program in those days. Ed Harris sighs at the point in the picture where this particular snafu is discussed and remarks, "Tell me this isn't a government operation."

We know now that it was this good-enough-for-government-work management style that led to the costly accidents that have plagued both NASA and the Soviet Program throughout the history of the space effort, and contributes greatly to both programs' present states of scientific confusion and political bootlicking. Such things might have been expected as a consequence of the bureaucratic nature of the Soviet system with its inherent weaknesses exaggerated by the staggering scope of their mission. But by doing it the American Way -- by having the design teams work almost independently of each other, and having hundreds of other project contractors spread out all over the country, apportioned by congressional districts represented by politicians who knew pork when they smelled it (Johnson Space Center itself being a particularly aromatic example) -- such problems were practically designed into the management structure. Not all that much different from the Soviet system, when you get right down to it; bureaucracy is bureaucracy, no matter where it grows.

A brilliantly slimy cameo appearance by Roger Corman (who gave Ron Howard his first directing job with EAT MY DUST in the 1970's) as a conservative member of Congress touring the Kennedy Space Center launch facilities, makes many of today's politicians from Newt Gingrich to Al Gore appear much more appealing, and highlights the kind of toe-shuffling dance NASA must have performed every day of its existence to justify its enormous costs (Corman, of course, became famous for making the cheapest movies in Hollywood on a tighter schedule than any big studio; often his films were better than the slickest, most expensive productions from the majors).

While one comes away from APOLLO 13 with an intense distaste for politicians and bureaucrats, it is also clear that though astronauts and cosmonauts are routinely celebrated as heroes in both nations, knowing the truth about the risks they took proves them to have been far braver, much smarter, infinitely tougher and more heroic than the Public Relations machines of either Pravda or the New York Times could possibly have depicted.

But the film also reminds us of all the other things that were going on in that fateful year that occupied the public's attention more than the utterly astounding feat of exploring our nearest satellite. The sad fact that none of the three networks bothered to broadcast the television transmission from the craft only hours before the accident shows how easily distracted the public had become by then. The Kent State massacre, the invasion of Cambodia, the trial of Lt. Calley and the revelation of the ugly details about My Lai, all of these horrors put the wonder of space exploration on the back burner of the public consciousness -- except among us 12 year old kids with our own pocket protectors and slide rules concocting fantastic dreams of space flight and heroism. As Ed Harris' character says near the end of the film, far from being NASA's greatest tragedy, he believed the safe return of the Apollo 13 crew would prove to be the agency's finest hour. Perhaps it was.

My own disillusion with NASA has grown steadily since the peak of the Apollo program. I sat enthralled in front of our television throughout the early years of that decade, captivated by all the moon missions, and I was heartbroken when the exploration of the moon ended after Apollo 17. The Space Shuttle suffers from the same bureaucratic syndrome that Apollo somehow managed to overcome, but its one spectacular disaster cost more lives and caused more damage to the organization than anything that might have stalled the moon landing. Had it not been for the fact that by the mid-1980s the Soviets had a working space station in place and a permanent presence in orbit, not to mention Ronald Reagan's cold war determination to best them in every field where our two nations competed, the shuttle program might have been scaled back even more after the Challenger explosion. I'd say we owe the Russians a helluva lot of credit for keeping our program going in the face of substantial odds against it.

Most of us who've followed the program in the days after Apollo, Skylab, and Mir know how much our knowledge base has expanded over the past 25 years since we last visited the moon, and can only hope that others in the audience will be startled into an awareness that we could easily go back to luna next year in a safer vehicle built for less money and with far more confidence using today's technology. I hope this aspect of the film is not so subtle that only SF fans and computer geeks feel this way while walking out of the theater.

I hope the film is successful in re-inspiring a new generation to strive for the kind of goals I grew up with. There are now several private space ventures that show promise of success, and I'm sure all the other computer nerds in the world share the same dreams I do. One of the first computer games I ever played on a Radio Shack TRS-80 was a text-based lunar landing simulation (of course, I crashed and burned quite a few times). I now have a freeware Windows program on my computer of a lunar landing game that can occupy hours of my time that should probably be devoted to other pursuits, but by golly I've become a pretty good LEM pilot by now and hell, it's the closest I'm ever going to come to being an astronaut.

Simulations are fun, but nothing can compare to the real thing. We need the real thing, or our fragile society will become so self-absorbed that we will lose the unique perspective we gained by looking back on our planet from another celestial body. Those incredible pictures really had a way of demonstrating how insignificant our species is in proportion to the rest of the universe, but at the same time, they captured all the beauty and importance of our tiny planet, orbiting at just the right distance from the sun to make life possible. I don't think anyone ever really understood how precious and important life was until they gazed at the surface of an utterly dead world. We'd done enough advanced preparation and theorizing to know what to expect on the moon, so there wouldn't be any nasty surprises awaiting us, but no amount of intellectual conjecture could have prepared us for the emotional consequences of looking at the utter desolation and lifelessness of such a place. Human life in the 1960s and 70s seemed to have lost quite a bit of its value, when millions of people were massacred in Cambodia and almost half a million Americans lost their lives for little or no valid reason in Vietnam. But while the insanity of nuclear weapons proliferation and the preposterous policy of Mutually Assured Destruction were all that kept the superpowers from blowing each other to kingdom come, perhaps the reality of the lunar exploration had a beneficial influence on revealing the utter "lunacy" of these kinds of political decisions made in both countries.

I hope APOLLO 13 awakens other dreamers from their long nap and inspires today's visionaries to develop practical applications to help us return to the moon to establish a permanent scientific and industrial complex there. It's the obvious logical step.

NASA APOLLO 13 LINKS
Apollo 13
Apollo 13 Facts
Additional Information on Apollo 13
The last one has links to sound and image files.