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DISASTERS IN SPACE

Apollo 13

Unlucky number 13 was the Apollo mission that never landed on the Moon and barely made it back to Earth. NASA had had one previous disaster: in 1967 three astronauts died in a fire on the launchpad. But the Apollo 13 accident in 1970 was unprecedented for the American space program. Three men in space, with the eyes of the world upon them, suddenly heard a loud bang and watched as their oxygen tanks suddenly emptied. "OK, Houston, we'Ve had a problem," they reported to the command center in a masterpiece of understatement. They still had the Lunar Module, though, and used it as a lifeboat on the long, cold trip home. The temperature was lowered to 38° F to conserve oxygen and electricity. Even so, the astronauts barely made it back to Earth ahead of the failure of their oxygen.

The Soyuz Mission

The following year tragedy did strike Soviet cosmonauts. Following a record-setting twenty-four-day stay in a space station, the cosmonauts separated their ship, Soyuz 11, and began landing procedures. Braking rockets fired as the ship reentered Earth's atmosphere. After that, ground controllers lost contact with the ship. The parachute system functioned normally, and soft-landing engines were fired. But when the ground crew went to pick them up, they opened the hatch and found all three cosmonauts dead. An investigation found that thirty minutes before landing, the hatch had opened slightly, due to a combination of human error and mechanical failure. Their air supply was sucked out into space, suffocating them.

Skylab Falls

While the Apollo and Soyuz accidents may have made people more solemn about the risks of space flight, the falling of the Skylab space station made NASA the butt of jokes. Apollo could be said to have turned out safely. Cold War fervor made the Soyuz deaths appear to be evidence of Soviet incompetence. But the announcement in June 1979 (only months after the Three Mile Island accident) that the $2.6 billion Skylab was in a decaying orbit and that the equipment previously designed to boost it higher had failed generated bad press for NASA. Even Congress joined in the ridicule of NASA. "Whereas, everything that goes up must come down," began a proposed resolution from an Oregon representative, "it is the sense of the Congress that Skylab should not be permitted to fall in Oregon, where it might mar the natural beauty." Despite the odds, Skylab did not fall into one of the world's oceans, as NASA officials had hoped it would. Instead, it landed in sparsely populated Western Australia. Fortunately, no one was injured.

Questioning Priorities

These accidents tarnished NASA's reputation. They provided ammunition for the naysayers and doubters who felt the billions spent on the space program would be better used on Earth. A major theme of the Democratic Party effort to defeat Nixon in 1972 was that science funding should be redirected from the space program and the Vietnam War to health, education, poverty, crime, and drug control improvements. Even the National Academy of Sciences criticized the space program from time to time for being wasteful and expensive. The Space Shuttle, designed as a reusable craft that could orbit the Earth for up to thirty days, was slated to be ready for use by late in the decade but was plagued by technical problems and NASA funding cuts. From the end of the Apollo program in 1975 until the first shuttle launch in 1981, it seemed that the era of human space flight was petering out.