Astronaut Tuesday

Tuesday morning I got Andrew out of school and took all the children to BYU to hear Capt. James Lovell, commander of the Apollo 13, speak. It looked like quite a few people had the same idea, since there were lots of parents with children and young people in the audience. It was quite amazing to hear him talk about his experiences with Apollo 8 and Apollo 13. (The movie is quite accurate since it is based on his book.) Apollo 8, he said, was a spiritual experience when they saw the "Earth rise" over the moon on Christmas Day.

Here's Andrew's description of Apollo 13 (so far--he revises it and now wants to write a little book about it):

Today we got to go to the Marriott Center and listen to Jim Lovell, captain of Apollo 13. He's old right now because when Mommy was a little baby he went on his fourth mission. On his fourth mission when he was about to land on the moon he was 45,000 miles away from the moon and fives times that distance from earth. When they were about to land there was a trigger on a wire and a fire in the spacecraft which started to burn out the first fuel cell. When there was the big bang that had made a big hole in the command module, which had also made a hole in the oxygen tank and there was oxygen escaping. They didn't like this. They really did not get to land on the moon. They swung around part of the moon that we don't see from earth. By then they might have been panicking. I don't know if they were panicking. The command module was crippled. Like I said, there's a big hole that is crippled on the edges. They got back to earth, but it was very long. They were cold and it wasn't a nice flight back to earth. When they had learned that the explosion had damaged one of the water tanks and they were losing water, they were so disappointed.