17 April 2024

Apollo 13 (not the movie)

Both Lovell and Swigert thought that the bang—or shudder—had come from the lunar module, and as Haise emerged from the tunnel Swigert shot out of his seat and slammed the command-module hatch shut behind him. Haise scrambled to his seat—the right-hand one—for the master alarm was now sounding in his earphones. Swigert had noticed an amber caution light glowing overhead. It didn’t signal trouble in the oxygen tank, because that alarm system was still tied up by the low-pressure warning in the hydrogen tanks; rather, it signified trouble with the electrical system, the controls for which were near Haise. About this time, the Flight Surgeon, Dr. Willard R. Hawkins, noticed that the pulse readings for all three astronauts had shot up from about seventy to over a hundred and thirty.

--  Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.
"An Accident in Space"
The New Yorker, November 3, 1972

Me: It's the last sentence that begged me to post this.

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