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Apollo 13 Failure

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Three, two, one… The sky roared into a fiery red as the rocket shot into the sky, calming the surrounding atmosphere into a sudden silence. This was the launch of the Apollo 13 mission. Three astronauts, Lovell, Swigart, and Haise, were sent on this mission to explore a hilly section on the moon. So far, the mission was going as planned and very well, at least for now. No one knew of the catastrophe that was soon coming. When Swigart was instructed to “turn on the fans inside the oxygen tanks,” all went downhill. Seconds after the simple task was complete, there was a loud crash. “Faulty wiring in an oxygen tank had triggered an explosion.” Even though many thought of the mission as a failure, it was successful. This was because of a flawless mission that went completely downhill, but turned into something even greater than bringing back samples from the moon; it turned into using the astronauts and NASA engineer’s ingenuity to save this important mission. Sometimes, things don’t work out the way you want them to, but that’s when you can reach the greatest success of all. These men had to “do everything in their power to bring the astronauts home.” …show more content…
When the astronauts had to use the LEM to get home, “the LEM didn’t have enough power or water to last that long.” “The ship kept drifting off course. The LEM’s air filters stopped working, and the air became toxic with CO2 .” But they successfully solved each problem that arose. “To correct the spacecraft’s position, they instructed the astronauts to fire the engine in short bursts. To clean the toxic air, the engineers designed a fix for the air filters using materials on board.” “These men knew Apollo 13’s systems better than they knew their own bedrooms.” These men used their skills to find a solution to the many problems they faced, but there was one problem they still had to

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