Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed

I picked this book up for my kindle with the general idea of reading about the Apollo 13 disaster & recovery. I never considered it a total immersion page turner, but that's what it turned out to be! I actually read the book straight through one Saturday! I ended up having to go to bed only a few pages short of the end. I turned the brightness way down on my Kindle Fire HD & finished the book!

There are some things that you need to know:

1) The book has a lot of technical detail. Don't worry, you'll actually breeze through it. (One particular example is a "Main Bus B undervolt!" This means that the voltage (pressure) has dropped. In order to maintain the same power draw, the Amperage (volume of electrons) has to increase. This is effectively a "brownout" and the extra amperage can severely damage the equipment.)

2) The ground staff were suffering the same delusions that those handling the pre-launch of the Challenger would later experience, "It's so redundant that something catastrophic just can't happen!"

3) The video at the end of the Apollo 13 movie showing the real-time satellite feed of the capsule coming in on its parachutes and splashing down REALLY HAPPENED!

Finally, while the book & the movie diverge in many respects, definitely re-watch the movie as it does as good a job as it possibly can in its allocated 90 minutes. It's a good movie, but the book is an absolute armchair grabbing thriller of the first magnitude!

I quite liked this book. I'll admit, I got it on my phone only because I had been curious about how the astronauts had used their chronographs to navigate while on their way back to Earth (a fact on which the book didn't quite deliver), but once I started actually reading it I was quite enthralled, and soon my attention was entrenched and I finished the book rather quickly, reading over dinner and over lunch breaks at work.

I had watched the movie Apollo 13 years prior to reading this book, and I had watched various documentaries on the topic prior to as well as after reading this book, besides having reas juat a little bit about the accident as a schoolboy, but despite all that nothing took away interest in reading this book, so I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in how space exploration works (the basic organizing principles of team management seem to have remained unchanged, and seem to be shared by both the Americans and the Russians, judging how the two countries launch, guide, and return their space explorers -- or so my times of watching space shuttle-MIR station docking, a Hubble repair mission, and other missions would have me believe).

I liked how the episode was brought to life with how tension and urgency that went into bringing back some of America's finest pilots. I also liked the details of job responsibilities were divided among the astronauts and among the various ground teams.

I liked how the book detailed how the mission was flown so much from the ground, so to speak. The book has quite a run down of how NASA ordered and procured parts for various aspects of the lunar mission, and how they meticulously kept records, and how they worked so closely with their contractors and sub-contractors to quickly diagnose the problem amd to come up with quick fixes that saved the astronauts, and how they worked to make sure everything worked in the face of the unexpected. It was nice to see details that hinted at the vast scale of the emergency operations, in how they tried to muster ships literally across the oceans and far away seas in order to ensure the safe return of some of their best.

On another note, I would also recommend this book to anyone who likes to believe that the moon landings were a hoax on the ground that the Apollo craft had less computing power than a modern watch (other aspects of the hoax conspiracy theorists probably cannot be addressed by this book, as these astronauts did not actually get to land on the moon) -- for this book details how the Apollo missions did their onboard computations without the bells and whistles that merely make modern computer interfaces appealing, but without adding much to what some of these modern computers can accomplish. Further, this book also details how navigation was performed by sextant in the same manner as ancient mariners -- an art lost on those armchair critics who like to feel that they can have a grasp on any information at their fingertips even while they look at information selectively). The book also details how so much of the mission's numerically intensive trajectory, timing, and other calculations were performed by actual supercomputers, that NASA had on the ground, with data provided by the Apollo astronauts and their instruments. This book also talks about how the missions were actually observable to people with ground based optical telescopes while en route to the moon (the lander and command modules were too small to be identified using optical telescopes on Earth, or Earth bound orbits once they were far enough away -- a fact that anyone can readily ascertain by learning about spatial resolution in any graduate level, or perhaps even undergraduate level, optics course).

It's perhaps funny now, but was deadly serious then, that in the immediate aftermath of Apollo 13's crippling explosion the problem with the moon bound rocket was actually observed from Earth, using an amateur telescope, before the problem was actually diagnosed by NASA and the astronautts, independently -- but I should let you read more of that from the book.

On the whole this book provided some good perspectives on how NASA managed a tremendously complex project, and I would recommend it even on just that ground, the same way that I would recommend other books written about highly complex projects.

This is a good companion piece to Lost Moon, the exceptional book by astronaut Jim Lovell. Lost Moon was published in 1994 and is the basis for the Ron Howard movie Apollo 13. Thirteen: The Flight That Failed was published in 1972, just 2 years after the Apollo 13 mission. Whereas Lost Moon is more of the perspective of the astronauts, Thirteen is the view from Mission Control. This is the story of the men who solved innumerable problems and got the spacecraft home. A quick read, but quite informative. Occasionally the acronyms and space jargon can confuse the reader, but this is a minor quibble. Good Read!

I watched much of the Apollo 13 flight and recovery on television. I've seen Tom Hanks get back to earth. I have now read a step by step account of the what I can only describe as the best of America, do something impossible. Readigthis has brought me back to when I saw the Command Module drifting down and splash into the Pacific. If you think the shuttle missions were boring, and the Space Station is the crew singing or mugging for the camera's broadcasting to earth, you need tto read this book. The author puts all the fear, the incredible work, and the thought processes that turned a disaster into a success.

A recounting of events written along a straight timeline. The writing itself isn't dramatic. It reports the facts as they unfolded and that's fine. The events themselves are dramatic enough. The problems kept piling up while each division of engineers, doing their separate part, competed for what precious energy remained in the batteries needed to get the crew home alive. Written with a steady hand reflecting the focus required by NASA engineers to surmount the escalating number of problems.

Average at best. Wikipedia information told in a mediocre fashion.

Fred Haise was a close friend of my Dad's, Ted Harkness. They worked at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland and had many an adventure like flying the "Vomit Comet" together. Later my Dad transferred to Cape Kennedy. When Apollo 13's catastrophic failure occurred, my Dad disappeared. We didn't see him again until the team brought Fredo and the others home safely. My Dad is gone now, but I don't think he thought of this Herculean effort and it's outcome as a failure. What they accomplished was nothing short of a miracle.

This was a relatively quick read, full of action and commentary about the Apollo 13 mission. Because it was a relatively quick read, it almost had the feel of a movie to me. I had expected a longer book with a lot more detail. However, I found the pace and the level of detail enjoyable. This was an interesting read to me that filled in a lot of the holes from the Apollo 13 movie and focused on the story in Mission Control. I had no idea the types of calculations that needed to be done to bring a spacecraft back, nor the number of people that were needed to do those calculations. I recommend this book to anyone who wanted to know more about this mission. The only bad thing that I can say about this book was that I was surprised at the number of spelling and punctuation errors.

With a Kindle, one sometimes may be unaware how near to finishing a book one might be. But most books wind down toward a conclusion and often have an epilog to flesh out the aftermath. "Thirteen" simply stops without any real sense of wrapping up the story of the events. It left me wanting to know the answer to the questions of "and then....?"

This is an old book, published soon after the accident. It is also THE best book on what happened. What makes it so good is that it told from Mission Control's point of view. A detailed and edge of your seat read. Read this and then go find Jim Lovell's LOST MOON to get the other side of the story (from the astronaut's of Apollo 13 perspective). Lost Moon was made into APOLLO 13 (movie, with T. Hanks) some 20 years ago.