With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

Houston, we have a problem

2005 April 07 01:06

I spent the latter part of the evening burning DVD-Rs and listening to Ron Howard's commentary track on the Apollo 13 Special edition.

Early in the ascent to Earth orbit, one of the engines in the first stage of the Saturn 5 rocket shut down unexpectedly. The guidance experts on the ground said that the mission could continue, as long as the other four engines continued running. Jim Lovell (commander, played in the movie by Tom Hanks) says "Well that was the glitch for this mission".

I had assumed that line was added as dramatic irony. As it turns out, that was directly from a transcript of the flight tapes.

[I should probably admit here and now that in addition to spending way too much time thinking about airplanes, I'm a little bit of a space nut, particularly about the Apollo program. Be sure to watch this space for a long rambling post about the AGC, the guidance and control computer used in the Apollo spacecraft.]