Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

After many iterations, the tiger team had completed a checklist that they thought would work. It also left a 16 amp-hours margin, the minimum that the recovery people insisted upon in case the Odyssey landed in the Stable 2, or upside-down, position in the ocean. This stringent budget was taken over to the flight simulators, where Ken Mattingly, the astronaut who would have been on Apollo 13 if he had not been exposed to the measles, tried it out. To Mattingly’s surprise, the hastily prepared checklist worked without a hitch. But instead of landing with a 16-amp-hour surplus, Mattingly ended with a 10-amp-hour deficit. There was no place to cut. Aaron was already holding most of the systems to budgets that the controllers had originally said they couldn’t possibly live with. Bill Peters, the lead TELMU, came to the rescue. He was now confident that Aquarius would have a small reserve of battery power. The spacecraft’s design provided for power to flow from the C.S.M. to the LEM, to top off the LEM’s batteries. The MER had figured out a way to do it backwards. Aaron could gain 20 amp-hours by using Aquarius to charge Odyssey’s half-depleted Battery A.