S2 Ep.04 Power brokers

13 Minutes to the Moon

BBC

Documentary, History, Society & Culture, Technology

4.8 • 9.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Power must be brutally rationed after the crew fly around the Moon. As systems are switched off, their cold, dark ship is reduced to little more than a husk coasting in space. #13MinutestotheMoon Watch videos about the Apollo 13 mission: www.bbcworldservice.com/13minutes Presented by Kevin Fong. Archive: Nasa Starring: Gerry Griffin Jim Kelly Gene Kranz, courtesy of the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project John Aaron Jim Lovell Fred Haise Dave Reed Jerry Bostick Chuck Deiterich Merlin Merritt Bill Peters Written by Kevin Fong and Mark Rickards Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg for Bleeding Fingers Music BBC Radio Science Unit for the BBC World Service

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Mordet Higroth and just before 13 minutes to the moon starts, I've been given 13 seconds
0:06.1	to tell you about my podcast, Death in Ice Valley. Okay, here goes. It's about something else
0:13.8	that happened in the same year as Apollo 13 in Norway, the discovery of an unidentified body
0:20.5	of a woman who was she I've been trying to find out. That's Death in Ice Valley.
0:39.2	Apollo 13 is approaching the fourth day of its ill-fated flight.
0:44.4	Nine hours ago, an explosion crippled their command module. They have battled against
0:49.9	failing systems and a dying spacecraft ever since. It's now all about creating what opportunities
0:56.9	they can from moment to moment and this is how they hope to buy their survival. Across the United
1:04.8	States, millions tune in to the television coverage. Veteran CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite
1:12.0	leads the nation through the crisis. The flight of the Apollo 13 to the moon is in serious
1:20.4	jeopardy this morning and is not going to make a moon landing and this is indeed the greatest
1:26.5	emergency probably yet in the American space program. Their life's support and power are running out.
1:34.6	They're now on a path that will take them home but traveling too slowly to get them back to the
1:40.0	right place on Earth in good time. Our job was basically to try to figure out what on board the
1:48.4	spacecraft was still usable and to come up with a game plan to get them home. We had a command
1:54.8	module that was our reentry vessel. It had the heat shield but it had only about two and a half
1:58.8	hours of electrical power lifetime. We had the service module which is where the explosion
2:03.8	occurred. It was virtually useless. We had the lunar module was attached in the other end of this
2:08.5	stack through a small tunnel and that was our lifeboat. We're going to be outside all known design
2:15.5	and test boundaries of the spacecraft we got to come up with the answers and the crew was quite
2:20.0	concerned that they still didn't have the game plan in hand. From the BBC World Service, this
2:30.4	is 13 minutes to the moon, season two. I'm Kevin Fong and this is the incredible story of the flight
	...

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