Finally, at 2:43 in the morning, Lovell pushed the ignition button and the DPS engine ran at low throttle for thirty seconds, putting the spacecraft into a trajectory that, even without a second burn, would bring it down in the Indian Ocean not quite four days later. Lovell was relieved. He wasn’t completely confident that the burn provided them a survivable entry, but at least the spacecraft would intercept the earth’s atmosphere. In his mind, this was much better than the alternative they had just avoided—orbiting the earth indefinitely, in a lonely revolution with an apogee of 240,000 miles
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