There were a couple of dozen controllers on duty, of whom only about half were directly involved with the running of the spacecraft at any given time. In the front row, which was called the Trench, sat three Flight Dynamics Engineers, the men responsible for the ship’s trajectory: from right to left, the Guidance Officer, or GUIDO, who was the chief navigation officer; the Flight Dynamics Officer, or FIDO, who plotted the trajectory and made sure the spacecraft followed it; and the Retrofire Officer, or RETRO, who was in charge of the spacecraft’s reëntry into the earth’s atmosphere. Most of the second row, behind the Trench, was taken up by the Systems Operations Engineers, who monitored the equipment inside the spacecraft: in the center, the EECOM, who looked after the electrical, environmental, and other systems in the command module, where the astronauts rode; next to him, the LM Systems Officer, or TELMU, who did the same thing for the lunar module, in which the astronauts would land on the moon; and then two Guidance and Navigation Control Officers—one, the GNC, for the command module, and the other, the CONTROL, for the lunar module—who were in charge not only of the guidance and navigation equipment in the two modules but of the propulsion system as well. To their left was the Spacecraft Communicator, known—from the old Mercury-capsule days—as the CAPCOM, the only man who could talk directly with the astronauts, and to his left was the Flight Surgeon. Behind the Flight Surgeon, in the third row, was the Instrument and Communications Officer, or INCO, who was responsible for the radios and telemetry transmitters aboard the spacecraft. Finally, in the center of the third row—a good vantage point for keeping an eye on everyone else—there was the Flight Director, the ship’s earthbound co-captain. (In the fourth row sat administrators, Public Affairs Officers, and so on.)

There were four shifts, or teams, of flight controllers—White, Black, Maroon, and Gold—and at that moment the White Team was on duty. The controllers talked to each other over an intercom hookup called the loop. To cut down on what they called loop chatter, which had a way of sounding like random thoughts popping up in a single individual’s mind, the controllers referred to each other by their acronyms or abbreviations: FIDO, GUIDO, RETRO, CAPCOM, EECOM, and so on. Apollo 13 was just plain “Thirteen.”

On April 13th, about half an hour before the white spot was seen by Saulietis and his companions, the flight controllers were watching a television show, which the astronauts were broadcasting from the spacecraft, and which was projected on one of the big screens at the front of the room. As it happened, none of the three major networks carried the telecast—though they would show tapes of it later—and it concluded ten minutes before the occurrence of the episode that could have made it as dramatic as any performance in history. As the flight controllers leaned back in their chairs to watch, they thought the astronauts seemed happy. Captain Lovell, the commander, who was forty-two, and who had graduated from Annapolis in 1952, ten years before he became an astronaut, was cameraman and announcer for the show; he first panned the camera around the gray interior of the command module, a cone whose base was almost thirteen feet in diameter and whose height was ten and a half feet, It was about as big as the inside of a small station wagon, though the astronauts, who could float about, found it roomier than a similar space on the ground. Lovell was resting on the center couch. Beneath him was the service module, which contained, among other things, the electrical system, including the two big oxygen tanks. The cylindrical service module, with the conical command module at one end, formed a single pointed unit, in front of which was the lunar module, giving the spacecraft a total length of almost sixty feet. Above Lovell’s head, at the apex of the cone, was a round hatch leading through a short tunnel to the lunar module. Lovell had flown in space three times, and this was the second time he had set out for the moon; he had circled it, in December, 1968, as a member of the Apollo 8 mission. This may have accounted for a certain bland professionalism he displayed as master of ceremonies. He began, “What we plan to do for you today is start out in the spaceship Odyssey and take you on through from Odyssey in through the tunnel into Aquarius.” Odyssey was the code name for the command module, and Aquarius for the LM. (The latter was named for a song in the musical “Hair,” which Lovell—who was Special Consultant to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports—had not seen. When he caught up with the show later, he walked out.)

Lovell aimed the camera at Haise, the lunar-module pilot, who was hovering by the hatch, ready to lead the way into the LM. Clothed, like the others, in white coveralls, Haise was hard to make out, because the television relay was none too sharp. Haise, a native of Biloxi, Mississippi, is a slight man with dark-brown hair and a square jaw, who speaks with a slight drawl. Although he had become an astronaut only four years before, and this was his first spaceflight, he had made enough of an impression so that Lovell and the other Apollo 8 astronauts had seen fit to name a crater on the moon after him. Haise was not particularly busy at the moment—the LM was not scheduled to be powered up until they were in lunar orbit, a day hence—so Lovell had persuaded him to act as guide for his tour, and now Lovell, holding the TV camera at arm’s length, followed Haise as he swam through the tunnel into the LM. There Haise demonstrated various pieces of equipment to be used on the moon, including a rectangular bag (called the Gunga Din) that he and Lovell would wear inside their helmets, so that they could drink while they walked about the Fra Mauro hills. “So if you hear any funny noises on television during our moon walk, it is probably just the drink bag,” Lovell said. Haise was doing something in the middle of the LM now, but the flight controllers had trouble seeing exactly what it was. The CAPCOM asked if he was opening the food locker, and the flight controllers laughed, because Haise had a well-known penchant for food. Haise said that he was rigging his hammock for sleep, and the CAPCOM replied, “Roger. Sleeping and then eating.”

Leaving Haise in the LM, Lovell went back through the tunnel and, in the command module, sought out the third member of the crew—Swigert, the command-module pilot. “There he is! We see him!” the CAPCOM said, and, sure enough, there he was, seated before the ship’s controls in the middle one of the astronauts’ three seats, surrounded on three sides by nine dashboard panels. Swigert, a sharp-faced, sharp-eyed man, who was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1931, and had become an astronaut with Haise in 1966, was too busy just then to do more than smile at the camera. He did not take a big part in the television show. This was his first spaceflight, as it was Haise’s, but he felt himself to be under more pressure, because he had been merely the backup command-module pilot, and had been officially assigned to the flight only the day before it left, after the prime crew had been exposed to German measles and it was discovered that the prime command-module pilot was susceptible. Lovell had worked with Swigert for two days without letup before agreeing to take him on the flight. (Swigert had been in such a rush that he hadn’t thought about completing his 1969 income-tax return, due in four days, until he was a quarter of the way to the moon.) During the first fifty-five hours of the flight, Swigert had run into a few minor difficulties; for instance, he had been having trouble reading the quantity gauge for one of the oxygen tanks, which had gone off-scale on the high side, and earlier that day the CAPCOM had told him he could expect frequent requests from the ground to turn on the fans in the tank to stir up the oxygen—what is called a “cryogenic stir”—for the purpose of obtaining accurate quantity readings. Now, as the television show continued, Swigert found a moment to hold the camera and trained it on the commander; Lovell appeared on the screen for the first time. A tall, sober-looking man whose face at times breaks into a broad grin, Lovell demonstrated a tape recorder that could play a number of songs, among them “Aquarius” and the Richard Strauss “Thus Spake Zarathustra” theme used in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” At length, the CAPCOM broke in to suggest that Lovell conclude the program. The commander replied, “Roger. Sounds good. This is the crew of Apollo 13 wishing everyone there a nice evening, and we’re just about ready to close out our inspection of Aquarius and get back for a pleasant evening in Odyssey. Good night.” It was then 9:00 p.m.