Alan Shepard's ear infection had flared up, therefore his crew was bumped from the primary flight crew to a later mission, and instead Jim Lovell's crew was bumped up to the primary flight crew for the Apollo 13 mission. Two days before the scheduled Apollo 13 mission. Blood work came back from the flight surgeon and according to the surgeon, ken Mattingly das the measles and everyone had been exposed to it. All of the other astronauts had been exposed to it and have had it except for Ken. Naturally Ken was extremely devastated and shocked. So the man that replaced Ken as the navigator was a back-up crewman whose name was Jack Swagart, Jack was a little rusty with the controls since he had not practiced for the past two weeks.

Soon after the launch of the Apollo 13 rocket, there was a big problem with the number 5 main engine cutoff, but mission control said there would be no big problem unless there was a loss of another engine. Soon thereafter, Jack was in charge of stirring the oxygen tanks and he did so, but something incredibly bad went wrong. That's when the famous term, "Houston, we have a proble

m", was derived from that very oxygen stir. Everything was in complete disarray and everyone was so confused. Of the 3 total oxygen tanks, two of then were completely down and not giving any kind of reading whatsoever.

Now, they only have 15 minutes to transfer all of their things out of the lem module into the lunar module to use it as a lifeboat for their safety. They know they need to get back and get back soon, but they can just turn around, they discover that it would save a lot of valuable energy if they just used the moons gravitational pull an slingshot off of it. In order for all of the astronauts to get back they need to shut down all of the command module and need to run on only 12 amperes, twelve amps is barely enough to even power a vacuum cleaner. Now as if their problems couldn't get any worse, before there was a problem with the lack of oxygen, now their was a problem with the lack of Carbon Dioxide. Carbon Dioxide, when exposed to it, can be very fatal.

Some of the flight control crew just reasoned with themselves and just thought that there was a problem with the instruments reading. But Gene Crantz, the head of mission control, knew that it was a lot more than just a wrong instrument reading, he

He had to be careful not to

Some common words found in the essay are:
Gene Crantz, Swagart Jack, Carbon Dioxide, Ken Houston, Jim Lovell's, Alan Shepard's, Naturally Ken, John Paul, , flight crew, apollo 13, carbon dioxide, lem module, crew bumped primary, 13 mission, bumped primary, primary flight, gene crantz, flight control, apollo 13 mission, primary flight crew, bumped primary flight, reaction valves,
Approximate Word count = 861
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)