News Section | Astronomy and Space
Original ‘Apollo 13’ navigation checklist expected to fetch £25k at auction
A record of the frantic calculations at the heart of a life-or-death space drama is set to go under the hammer.
The navigation checklist re-written by astronaut James Lovell to get his crew back to Earth – two hours after he uttered the famous words “Houston, we have a problem”- is expected to fetch around 25,000 pounds, the Telegraph reported.
Had he miscalculated the guidance data by just a fraction then the three man crew would have drifted off into space and oblivion.
Lovell, played by Tom Hanks in the hit 1995 film ‘Apollo 13’, is now selling the checklist, a printed data booklet annotated with his pen and pencil recalculations during the incident in 1970.
The astronaut was forced to write out the new figures when, 55 hours into a routine moon mission, an on-board explosion crippled the main command module Odyssey.
As a result the crew had to use the Lunar module – the small craft the astronauts should have used to take them to the moon – to fly them home.
The document is the activation checklist for the Lunar craft Aquarius.
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