Apollo 13 Study Guide

INTRODUCTION FOR TEACHERS ‘Apollo 13’, released by Universal Pictures, is a space drama starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise, Bill Paxton and Ed Harris. It follows the extraordinary story of the Apollo 13 space mission, which intended to place astronauts on the Moon for the third time, but instead became famous as the first deep-space emergency. Oxygen tanks on the spacecraft blew up 200,000 miles from Earth, and the three astronauts on board had to use their Lunar Module as a makeshift lifeboat; the fact that they survived the journey home was a miracle of resilience and human resourcefulness, and forms the main drama of the film. This study guide is not aimed at a film studies audience, and only touches on the Apollo 13 mission in a very broad context. It is aimed primarily at teachers of General Studies at A’ level, and provides resource material in three main areas. First, it looks at the ways that space has always excited the human imagination, and shows how space travel can be seen as a development of great explorations on Earth. Second, it focuses on the Apollo Programme and the race for the Moon, explaining how this race was born out of Cold War rivalries. Third, it looks at the future of space travel in the light of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. A viewing of ‘Apollo 13’ will provide a springboard for discussion in all these areas, and should be seen as a teaching resource working in parallel with this guide. A PRESIDENT’S PROMISE “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be so impressive to mankind, or more important for the long- range exploration of space, and none will be more difficult or expensive to accomplish.” On the 25th of May 1961, John F. Kennedy, the newly-elected President of the United States, delivered the most daring and audacious speech of his short presidential career. He threw out a challenge to America’s rocket scientists. In exchange for enough cash to fund an intensive space programme, they must achieve the unbelievable: a return flight to the moon . His speech continued: “We shall send to the moon, two hundred and forty thousand miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than three hundred feet tall, capable of standing heat and stresses several times greater than have ever been experienced, made of new alloys, some of which have not been invented, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown destination… And as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on this, the most hazardous and dangerous adventure on which man has ever embarked..” In the event Kennedy’s promise - that America would make a moon landing “before this decade is out” was met just months within the deadline. But on the 21st of July 1969, the dream was accomplished: Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin, two of the three astronauts piloting Apollo 11, actually walked on the surface of the moon. They spent three hours loping about, enjoying the moon’s curiously weak gravity; they collected a few moon rocks, and they sunk an American flag into the moon-dust as proof of their visit (although with a live TV audience of millions watching their every move, this latter formality was hardly necessary). Then they piloted their lunar module ‘Eagle’ back to the command module, steered by the third astronaut Michael Collins, and all three then returned to Earth to heroes’ welcomes and a place in the history books. In the film ‘Apollo 13’, Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) talks of Neil Armstrong in the same breath as Christopher Columbus, who supposedly first ‘discovered’ America, and the Wright Brothers, pioneers in human flight. And the cornparison is accurate; the feats accomplished by the Apollo missions rank on a par with the very greatest of human achievements. This study guide aims to provide background information on the Apollo missions. It hopes to stimulate discussion on a variety of topics, but the central question remains constant throughout: why, in May 1961, did President Kennedy make such a extraordinary promise? Why send a man to the moon? SPACE AND THE HUMAN IMAGINATION From the earliest days of human existence, men and women have searched for meaning in the mysteries of space. Even our most primitive ancestors noticed patterns in the movement of the Sun, the Moon and the stars, and in describing these patterns they turned the sky into a vast tapestry of myth and folklore. For the Ancient Greeks, the Sun’s daily passage across the sky was explained as the journey of a god, Apollo, riding a fiery chariot. For the Egyptians, the waning of the Moon was a monthly re- enactment of the dismemberment of the god Osiris, chopped into fourteen pieces by his enemy Typhon. Even today we call the major planets in our solar system by the names by which they were worshipped in the days of Ancient Rome: Mars, God of War; Venus, Goddess of Love; Neptune, God of the Oceans, and so on As human beings gained more scientific understanding, they learnt to distinguish between fanciful and real connections linking life on Earth and activity in the heavens. The hardest realisations have been comparatively recent. It is only five hundred years, for instance, since we discovered that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not vice versa, a discovery which rocked civilisation to its foundations, in that it quietly destroyed the notion that the universe and everything in it centred on man. Since then our true insignificance has become painfully apparent. We have learnt, for instance, that the Sun - the most marvellous object in our solar system - is simply an ordinary star, and that an infinite number of other solar systems exist just like ours. The Moon, equally, has been revealed as a rather dull and uninspiring place. Once it seemed magical, responsible for everything from fits of lunacy to the successful growth of plants. But science lays it bare: the Moon is simply a natural satellite of bare rock, travelling around the Earth at a distance of about a quarter of a million miles, trapped by our gravity into an endless and never-changing orbit. It is lifeless, with neither water nor atmosphere, and its surface is pitted with craters. Described like that it seems an unlikely place to want to visit. DISCUSSION POINTS 1 - MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE STARS · In groups, picture yourselves as members of a primitive society living many thousands of years ago, with little understanding of the universe or of man’s place within it. How would you have made sense of the Sun, the Moon and the stars? Try and create for yourselves stories that might help ‘explain’ the activity of the celestial bodies’ above you. · Now gather as much information as you can on real myths and legends that relate to the Sun, the Moon and the stars. Try and find material from as many different cultures as possible. Do any common ideas seem to emerge from these legends? And how do you respond to them? Do these legends seem absurd to you, or are they in some sense understandable? · Think in particular of the Moon, and the way the Moon affects life on Earth. At night, it dimly reflects the light of the Sun. Its weak gravitational pull controls the ebb and flow of our tides. And the twenty-eight day lunar cycle has a clear influence on many natural phenomena here on Earth. So it’s clearly wrong to dismiss every ‘heavenly influence’ as superstitious. But does that justify the horoscopes devoured by millions of newspaper readers every day? Where do you think the balance should lie between science and superstition? Curiously, the more humans discovered about the universe, the more fascinated we became. Learning the moon is simply a lump of rock did nothing to kill that fascination. In fact, our imagination has been more stimulated by the idea of space in the last hundred years than ever before. But maybe that’s not so surprising. After all, what a scientific understanding of space showed was that the planets - the Moon, Mars and so on - were physical entities, on predetermined orbits, a certain distance away from Earth. Suddenly it was apparent that these planets were potential destinations. Rather than worshipping the sky, or standing in awe of it, we could view it as a map of places we might one day actually visit. Seen like that, space travel is a simple development of transport improvements that were started centuries ago. From the invention of the wheel, to the steam train, the internal combustion engine, the aeroplane, from century to century man has travelled further and further with increasing ease. Now we think nothing of flying across the Atlantic in a day, when for our rural ancestors the thought of even visiting the nearest town was remarkable. And of course as soon as the means of travel is invented, the will to travel soon follows. That’s true even if the means of travel are still barely tested. Every great expedition in the history of human exploration has been coupled with risk. The ships used by Christopher Columbus to sail the Atlantic were so primitive they would fill a modern sailor with dread.

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