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Astronaut, Biloxi, Miss., Native Has Confidence in Training of Discovery's Crew

Posted on: Wednesday, 3 August 2005, 15:00 CDT

Aug. 3--HANCOCK COUNTY -- Once again the nation's attention is focused on space, and while Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise Jr. knows the angst of a brush-with-disaster flight, he said intense training has prepared Discovery's crew for any challenge.

"These astronauts are well trained; failures were imported into every simulation we did before Apollo. They intentionally put in failures and problems to prepare us," Haise said.

The Biloxi native, now 71, piloted Apollo's lunar module on one of the most famous space missions.

Apollo 13 was scheduled to land on the moon, but an explosion in the command module forced the three-man crew instead to just try to get back to Earth alive.

A liquid oxygen tank that helped fuel Apollo's primary power source exploded on the third day of the trip in 1970.

The ship's backup supply of liquid oxygen had a tiny lifespan of up to 10 hours, but at the time of the explosion, Apollo was more than 83 hours from home.

"The biggest thing in our minds was confusion, and then trying to figure out what had happened," Haise said. "For the people at Mission Control, it took them about 18 minutes to realize that we had a real problem."

During an eerie radio transmission with Mission Control seconds after the explosion, astronaut Jim Lovell attempted to explain what happened, uttering the now-famous words, "Houston, we have a problem."

The ingenuity and courage that helped Apollo's crew cheat death and splash safely into the Pacific Ocean later spawned an Oscar-winning movie starring Tom Hanks, who played Lovell.

For four days, the nation held its breath as Apollo limped back to Earth. But Haise, played in the movie by Bill Paxton, said he always believed the crew would survive.

"To me it wasn't uncertainty, because we had a plan, a list of things that had to happen to get us back," he said. "The only possible concern was damage to the heat shield."

The shield helped to protect the spacecraft from severe temperatures when re-entering the atmosphere. Haise said Apollo's heat shield was more durable than the tiles NASA uses today on the space shuttles.

The shield on Apollo was designed to absorb the burn and gradually melt away, unlike the tiles on the shuttle, which are used to deflect the heat.

Discovery astronauts planned to conduct a spacewalk early today to the underside of Discovery to remove two pieces of insulating foam that are poking out from the shuttle's underbelly (the actual repair was scheduled to start around 7 a.m. CDT, according to The Miami Herald), and could cause a possible heating problem.

The maneuver has never been attempted in space, but Haise said Discovery's crew has likely had a lot of practice.

"These people are trained on the ground to do those repairs, and a hundred other scenarios," he said. "I'm sure they plan to be extremely careful."

Hours after the Apollo explosion, NASA created a nationwide network of simulators, computers, engineers and experts to test possible situations in search of a way to get the crew home.

This week, NASA television has shown video of experts experimenting with different tools and cutting methods, in hopes of finding the safest way to remove the foam on the bottom of Discovery.

"I'm not sure that the two missions can be compared," Haise said. "But, in terms of public reaction, it only seems interesting to the public if it's the first exploration of another planetary body, or if you're having a problem."

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.

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Source: The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.)

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