Just saw a National Geographic program about Apollo 13 (I've been laid up for a while with a back injury and watching a lot of TV...what can I say...
).
Anyway, it was mentioned that there was a problem with the trajectory of the returning spacecraft which might have caused the craft to burn up in the atmosphere if it had not been corrected. As a result of the need to conserve power, the astronauts had turned off all the navigation equipment, so they had to adjust the course manually, basically by keeping the Earth centered in a window as they turned the craft using manual control. This could easily have gone wrong, and it was only the outstanding skills of the astronauts which allowed it to be successfully accomplished.
It was also mentioned that when the damage to the outside of the service module of the Apollo spacecraft was seen after that module was ejected, the damage was seen to be located very close to the command module (which the astronauts had to use for re-entry). The astronauts, and NASA, were uncertain, until the craft successfully re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, that the explosion which damaged the service module had not damaged the heat shielding of the command module.
So, in either of these two ways (a failure to correct the re-entry trajectory, or damage to the heat shielding of the command module), Apollo 13 could easily have ended up just like the Space Shuttle Columbia...disintegrating in a fireball while re-entering the atmosphere.
What if it had? How would this have affected the U.S. Space program? How seriously would support, and funding, for manned missions into space have been impacted? Would there have been additional Apollo flights? Or Skylab? Or the historic Apollo/Soyuz mission? Or, later, would there have been public support for the Space Shuttle?
). Anyway, it was mentioned that there was a problem with the trajectory of the returning spacecraft which might have caused the craft to burn up in the atmosphere if it had not been corrected. As a result of the need to conserve power, the astronauts had turned off all the navigation equipment, so they had to adjust the course manually, basically by keeping the Earth centered in a window as they turned the craft using manual control. This could easily have gone wrong, and it was only the outstanding skills of the astronauts which allowed it to be successfully accomplished.
It was also mentioned that when the damage to the outside of the service module of the Apollo spacecraft was seen after that module was ejected, the damage was seen to be located very close to the command module (which the astronauts had to use for re-entry). The astronauts, and NASA, were uncertain, until the craft successfully re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, that the explosion which damaged the service module had not damaged the heat shielding of the command module.
So, in either of these two ways (a failure to correct the re-entry trajectory, or damage to the heat shielding of the command module), Apollo 13 could easily have ended up just like the Space Shuttle Columbia...disintegrating in a fireball while re-entering the atmosphere.
What if it had? How would this have affected the U.S. Space program? How seriously would support, and funding, for manned missions into space have been impacted? Would there have been additional Apollo flights? Or Skylab? Or the historic Apollo/Soyuz mission? Or, later, would there have been public support for the Space Shuttle?