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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Skyman, post: 4348891, member: 28299&quot;]Fifty years ago today, Apollo 13 was coasting from the Earth to the Moon.&nbsp; The crew; Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, Jack Swigert, had just finished a TV broadcast that was not used by any of the TV networks in the US, as going to land on the Moon had become &quot;normal/boring&quot;.&nbsp; The astronauts were getting ready to go to sleep.&nbsp; There are several &quot;housekeeping&quot; chores the astronauts do before they go to sleep, and another set they do when they wake up.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>One of the chores the astronauts do before they go to sleep is to stir the O2 and H2 tanks.&nbsp; O2 and H2 are stored at cryogenic temperatures.&nbsp; They are mixed together in fuel cells, and the chemical process creates H2O and energy.&nbsp; O2 is also used for breathing in space.&nbsp; When stored at cryogenic temperatures, over time both O2 and H2 become somewhat stratified by the phase state they are in, e.g. liquid or gas.&nbsp; To keep combined in one &quot;slushy&quot; state there are fans inside the tanks that are turned on every now and then to mix the individual gases.&nbsp; When this occurred on Apollo 13 a spark from a failed wire in the O2 tank caused an explosion, that blew out the side of the Service Module, and put the crew in a potentially fatal situation.</p><p><br /></p><p>The crew was able to use their Lunar Module (LM) as a lifeboat to get back to Earth.&nbsp; For those of you that have not seen it, I would recommend the movie, &quot;Apollo 13&quot;.&nbsp; While not a documentary, it actually hews pretty closely to what actually happened (of course it does have some Hollywood &quot;drama&quot; added that did not occur in real life).</p><p><br /></p><p>Here&#039;s an interview with Jim Lovell and Fred Haise about the spaceflight:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-041320a-apollo13-50th-lovell-haise-interview.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-041320a-apollo13-50th-lovell-haise-interview.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-041320a-apollo13-50th-lovell-haise-interview.html</a></p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve attached an image of a page in my <i>Apollo 12</i> flight plan from roughly the same time that the explosion occurred in Apollo 13.&nbsp; You can see what the crew was supposed to do before they went to sleep in the <i>Presleep Checklist</i> about halfway down in the center column of the page.&nbsp; Needless to say, things didn&#039;t go quite that way on Apollo 13.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1100915[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Post a coin from 1970 in commemoration of the mission.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1100916[/ATTACH] </p><p>[ATTACH=full]1100917[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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