EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009 - 13

M is sio n C o n t r o l possible,” he said. Liebergot’s first response to inquiries from flight director Gene Kranz was that “instrumentation problems” might be to blame, but eventually the systems knowledge that EECOM and MOCR had acquired pointed to the true source. The failures were real and potentially catastrophic; the CSM was collapsing. Liebergot and his colleagues began initiating the sequence of powering down the CSM to preserve what limited power remained and simultaneously powering up the already docked lunar module (LM), which would be pressed into service as a lifeboat to get the astronauts home. The astronauts returned safely, thanks in no small part to the response of the MOCR positions. While Apollo 13 failed to meet its lunar objective, it was a success in that it demonstrated a systems 13 EE Times | Apollo | July 20, 2009 management approach to problemsolving. Simulations—the bane of the controllers’ existence—had given the team a precursory scenario that had forced consideration of many of the LM lifeboat contingencies that were ultimately used. After the mission was investigated at length, the genesis of its problems was traced to a 28-volt component in the cryo system; the part had not been updated to operate on a revised, 65-V specification. Overheating and cracked insulation in the component caused by earlier ground operations had gone undetected. The cryo stir—a standard inflight procedure—caused arcing in the stressed component, igniting the liquid oxygen tank in an explosion that cascaded failures down the line. Liebergot, fellow EECOMs and the entire MOCR team got it all to work in what is now a well-documented drama, but “it had been damned close,” Liebergot recalls. After Apollo, Liebergot continued at NASA as an EGIL (environmental, general instrumentation and life support), Skylab’s version of EECOM. The Skylab program made use of the hardware left orphaned by the cancellation of all flights after Apollo 17, putting the Apollo platform to work in an Earth-orbit role

http://http://

EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009