Voices from the Moon
What it was like, in the astronauts’ own words. Excerpts from a new book by Andrew Chaikin.
- By Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl
- AirSpaceMag.com, May 20, 2009
NASA
And of course, people often say, “Did you take a suicide pill?” or something like that. You didn’t [need] those. All you had to do was crank open the little valve to the hatch there…open up the little vent valve….Never would’ve thought about it [on Apollo 13] until all hope was lost. And then our idea was, if all hope was lost, if we went by the Earth—say we missed the Earth, and we were on an orbit about the sun, if we had exceeded the escape velocity….My idea was to hold off, you know, as long as we had options, as long as we could stand it, send back data….We probably would have been farther out than anybody. And then, you know, then we would decide, you know, what to do….Maybe we would have all committed suicide by opening up the vent valve. And that would have been the end of the deal.
—Jim Lovell, Apollo 13 commander
(Photo: Lovell inside the lunar module Aquarius.)
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Comments (1)
Another excellent book on this is Rocket Men by Craig Nelson. What I found fascinating about this book was the way Nelson deftly wove together the Apollo story with ongoing global events. The likes of Werner Von Brown, Walt Disney, Khrushchev, the Cold War, all come together in such a way as to shed a new light on an often told story.
Posted by Dave on July 18,2009 | 08:59 AM