(Wednesday, July 12, 1995)
I CAN HEAR IT: 'HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM HERE'
By Paul Harral
Four of us had been out to dinner - Steak and Ale, as I recall it now - and we had dropped by the United Press International news bureau at the Manned Spacecraft Center to help out during a television broadcast from space.
This was to be the third landing on the moon, and Americans - actually, more properly the Americans who made the decisions about what was to be broadcast on television when - had decided that this stuff was old hat.
Whereas during Apollos 11 and 12 the networks had carried TV shows from space live, they stayed with their regular programming during this one. But that didn't mean any less work for the print journalists involved.
Television shows from space were hectic times. Two staff members working at typewriters would take down the air-to-ground transmissions and pass the notes over to the lead writer on duty, who would prepare stories for transmission around the world.
Three of us in the room that night carried the byline designation "UPI Space Writer," meaning that we were to be especially knowledgeable about the technicalities of the mission and the equipment in flight.
I was one. The other two were Ed DeLong, assigned to the bureau at MSC (LX in UPI slang: Lunar eXploration. Get it?), and Al Rossiter, assigned to the UPI bureau at Cape Kennedy (BW for Bird Watch). I covered space only during the missions. The rest of the time I was bureau manager in Denver (DX).
We divided up the shifts. DeLong was responsible for the news report for morning newspapers; Rossiter for afternoon newspapers; and I, as the baby, filled in the gaps (often the overnight watch).
On this particular day, I had already worked a long day and was headed for bed after the TV show.
I had been taking air-to-ground. The show was over, and I had just stood up, took off the earphones and was headed to the restroom when Jim Lovell came up on the voice link to report: "Houston. We have a problem here."
It is a moment frozen in time in my mind. It was not what Lovell said; it was the tone in which it was said - very precisely, almost slowly.
Ed, Al and I all looked at each other and then sat back down. The time, as recorded by Facts on File Inc., which keeps track of such things, was about 10:07 p.m. EST on April 13. Apollo 13 was 205,000 miles from Earth.
A couple of years later, writing a brief capsule history of the Apollo series, I was shocked to discover that the flight had lasted only six days. Surely, I thought, it must have been twice that. But it wasn't.
What brings this up, of course, is the movie Apollo 13.
I'm not a movie critic (probably a good thing, too), but this is a film you ought to see. If you are of a certain age, it will bring the memories of Apollo 13 washing back over you. If you were too young to be aware during the flight, it is a slice of our nation's history you will want to understand.
If you are really interested, after you've seen the movie, read Lovell's book about it, Lost Moon. I read the book first. And I was reminded again by both the book and the movie what an amazing feat Apollo 13 really was.
An astronaut told me once that actual space flight was boring in comparison with simulated space flight. The people running the simulations were constantly tossing problems at the astronauts and the flight controllers to see whether they could figure them out.
But the flight controllers and the astronauts had never simulated this crisis. So not only did they have to figure out how to survive it, they first had to figure out what it was that they had to survive.
There were plenty of heroes. Three you know: Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. But you'll meet others in the book and the movie - people who worked feverishly in the background, inventing instant solutions to problems that they never dreamed might exist.
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Harral is vice president and editorial director for the Star-Telegram. His e-mail address is harralstar-telegram.com. You may telephone him at (817) 390-7836 or write him at P.O. Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101.
(Copyright Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Posted by permission.)