Can Apollo 13 make it back to Earth? 13 Minutes to the Moon Season 2, Episode 7 - BBC World Service

“I still have nightmares about this.” Can the crew survive the dangers of re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere?
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An error could see them either incinerated or becoming lost forever in deep space.
Watch more videos of Apollo missions to the Moon here: • Apollo missions to the...
Listen to 13 Minutes to the Moon podcast here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13x...
And watch the whole series on KZbin, with approved captions, here: • Playlist
Written by Kevin Fong and Andrew Luck-Baker
Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg for Bleeding Fingers Music
Archive: Nasa
Starring: Jim Lovell, John Aaron, Dave Reed, Hal Loden, Jerry Bostick, Jim Kelly, Fred Haise, Charlie Duke, Joe Kerwin, Gene Kranz, courtesy of the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, Chuck Dietrich, Marilyn Lovell, Gerry Griffin
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[@thomasluczak2868]

All hail the BBC.....that was freaking excellent. Many thanks from america.

[@issiewizzie]

Good work BBC world service . You are here.

[@wdwamena1]

Wow the closing remarks are just apt.........✌️

[@Chocolatesonnet]

Wonderful series. Thank you from the USA.

[@wdwamena1]

Thank you Kevin and thank you BBC

[@hutchian5]

I listened to all 7 episodes on a long car journey with my family and we were totally absorbed by the story.

[@AndrewBlacker-wr2ve]

Yup. It's a gripping narrative.

[@the_formula]

Ji 👌 Brilliant 👍

[@rbjassoc6]

Thank you so much :-)

[@jasonmarquez5776]

"You have good bedside manners Joe." That was a nice & humble moment. 🇺🇸❤

[@jackhanna4447]

Just excellent. Brings back such memories; I was a senior in High School at the time. Back then, it seemed like we could do anything... ...a great time.

[@shivamagarwal5057]

Lovely series 👌

[@nicholasmtetesha6117]

Enjoyed every minute of the documentary

[@AndrewBlacker-wr2ve]

I think both series are excellent.

[@stymiedagain]

I was so happy to see this pop up. I’m glad you were able to finish it. It was a really excellent series.

[@bobquinn314]

What an awesome and inspiring story. So well presented and documented.

[@jorymil]

Dr. Kevin Fong, you just spoke words that should be remembered by everyone. I kept waiting for an attribution to Gene Kranz, Jim Lovell, or someone else, but they were your own. Perhaps a bit long for a tattoo, but they need to be immortalized as much as the astronauts.

[@jorymil]

Really interesting to hear the historical BBC coverage.

[@russellblake9850]

A couple things I've been thinking ... 1) when Fred got "sick", why not delay the mission and keep the crew together? 2) I'm sure Jack was an excellent CM commander, but I thought a big piece of the crew was the team ? Ok, that may be the dramatic film, and maybe they're all professionals, but teamwork sounds like something they'd build during training. 3) I imagine "Iliad" was to complex a name (to pair with Odyssey) ?

[@jorymil]

There is a lot of precise timing and calculation that goes into launch schedules. Getting a rocket to the launchpad takes days, and the weather and sun/moon positions have to be just right. It's not quite like rescheduling an airline flight; it might be another month and tens of millions of dollars in delays. As for Swigert, it's not like they keep the crews segregated during training. I'm sure he had time to interact with Lovell and Haise before the mission. And it's not like he could train for all of the improvisation! It's funny - one of my (younger) classmates hadn't seen _Apollo 13_ ! Required viewing, along with _The Right Stuff_ , _Interstellar_ and _The Martian_ , IMO.

[@BBCWorldService]

Watch Season 2 of 13 minutes to the Moon here: kzbin.info/aero/PLz_B0PFGIn4daEaUX-8ZJHv40rGAINzFy

[@jamesfrearson9630]

An excellent documentary

[@russellblake9850]

it was a second awesome series ! One thing I thought you might have mentioned ... as I understand it the anomalous drift of the CM as it approached re-entry was due to them not having the expected moon rocks (a couple hundred pounds) (changing the center of mass and the overall mass, just slightly).

[@naimatullah5332]

Great, mesmerising

[@AndrewBlacker-wr2ve]

To passively heat the command module and lunar module stack, Apollo 13 was put into a consistent roll. It was called the 'bbq roll.' If this is true, what force can steer the stack off course?

[@F_Tim1961]

I assume that you are referring to the idea that the stack is a gyroscope and if you apply say a pitch to it to get it back on a course then the stack will move in yaw motion too. SPecifically if you look from the rear at the departing stack and it is rotating CW then if you try to pitch it up , the polar J vector will tend to move around to the Left or CCW as viewed from above. The torque required to pitch it up is omega pitch rad/s cross prod with (J * omega slow roll rad/s). More theory is required to derive the rate of yaw rotation in rad/s . Basically it is the torque impulse as above divided by the longitudinal 2nd moment of inertia of of the Stack. (this may in fact vary depending on where it is taken, ie Jxx may not be the same as Jyy , which is another complication). Once the stack had started to rotate in yaw it would just keep on going because there is nothing to damp the motion. Attempts to correct the yaw will create pitch. This suggests that during this passive heat control time there were no automatic course corrections done and that before correcting course, the axial roll was removed by applying a thruster torque. (RCS) I found this statement on a UK website under apollo_moon_shot Continued Translunar coast The CSM and LM continued their three day journey to the Moon tracked by mission control in Houston. Travelling through the vacuum of space, the flimsy Lunar Module no longer needed the protection of the LM Adapter. During this phase of the journey the spacecraft was put into a slow roll of two revolutions per hour to provide uniform solar heating, however this was stopped during navigation sightings and course corrections. as for what force can make the stack go off course - Solar wind acting differently on different parts of the craft can do that . The forces might be tiny but even a miniscule rotation (rad/s) becomes significant after 80 hrs. 2. The initial course was only as correct as the orientation that produced it. Nasa allegedly had access to radar return data from ground stations that could locate spacecraft. I have never been able to get to the bottom of this. For instance the fact that a radar signal gets back to a ground based dish still does not give you a precise direction in space. Perhaps if it is sent from the vehicle and contains timing data and is received at at least three locations widely separated on the earth you get a fix in the same sort of manner as conventional GPS. I have never seen the detail described.

[@jorymil]

Gravity from either the Earth or Moon. It's acting all the time, except for a brief moment where the force of Earth gravity exactly balances the Moon's. To put it more simply for others, the previous poster is describing the math for conservation of angular momentum, which is the physical principle involved.

[@x-bebi8943]

thanks

[@user-ri9hb6th1w]

I liked this vdeo alot but what happened to the breathing problem with the lithium hydroxide containers that didnt fit beacause the lunar module and the service module containers were different shapes square and round ....

[@jorymil]

They went into a pretty detailed explanation in a previous episode-4 or 5, IIRC.

[@animula6908]

The Covid propaganda was hilarious in retrospect. Update: it was waaay less successful than Apollo 13. Public health is harder than space flight. I feel for the man who said these things with such clear optimism and faith in bad initiatives that also failed a hundred years ago in fighting influenza. No hate though. Just the same cringe we all feel together thinking about how dumb the whole thing was, and how many mistakes were made by the wrong kind of leaders.

[@frankieobrien2667]

Pointless upload. Looking circles... Were these supposed to represent planets and other celestial bodies?

[@aanomad]

Defund BBC.

[@AndrewBlacker-wr2ve]

Easier to defunct you.