Chapter One
The Four-Inch Flight
"Houston, we have a problem."
At some time in the hours that followed that terse announcement from Apollo 13,
many of us in NASA's Mission Control Center wondered if we were going to lose
the crew. Each of us had indelible memories of that awful day three years before
when three other astronauts sat in an Apollo spacecraft firmly anchored to the
ground. Running a systems test. Routine. In terms of the distances involved in
spaceflight, we could almost reach out and touch them.
Moments after the first intimation that something had gone terribly wrong,
technicians were up in the gantry, desperately trying to open the hatch. It took
only seconds for an electrical glitch to ignite the oxygen-rich atmosphere of
the cabin, creating a fire that was virtually a contained explosion. In those
few seconds, the men inside the capsule knew what was happening — and they must
have realized, at the last moment, that there was no escape. We simply could not
reach them in time.
Now, three equally brave men were far beyond us in distance, far out in the vast
absolute zero wo ... read full excerpt from: Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond ebook
