Separation of the service module came at 138 hours into the mission, four and a half hours before splashdown. From his station in Odyssey, Swigert couldn’t see the service module as it drifted away. He could, however, hear excited voices from Aquarius. “There’s one whole side of the spacecraft missing,” Lovell reported to the ground. Wires were dangling, the area around the oxygen tanks was a tangle of ripped metal—“It’s really a mess,” Haise said. Until then, no one had realized the magnitude of the explosion.
