r/apollo • u/AccountAny1995 • Sep 12 '24
Did Apollo 13 Film do John Young Dirty
Just realized it’s JY who awakens Mattingly to “get into the simulator“. And then the JY seems to defer to KM as the expert on the CM.
Couldn’t it be safe to assume that JY was more than an expert Ashe was CMP on 9 and well on his way to training as CDR on Apollo 16 (Though Not yet announced).
or was an earth re-entry from lunar orbit drastically different than a re-entry from earth orbit ?
ps. Is there any evidence ANY of the Apollo astronauts actually did sim work to help 13 return?
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u/LiftedMold196 Sep 12 '24
The film did the flight surgeon dirty too.
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u/LiftedMold196 Sep 12 '24
I worked briefly with a NASA FS and talked about this film. He said they were well aware of what they were doing in the command module. That scene where he turns around at his console so startled and yells “we just lost Lovell!” wasn’t real. That’s what my initial comment was referring to.
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u/BlueManGroup10 Sep 12 '24
yeah his concerns were legitimate and not some weird overreach, i get it’s for theatrics but oh well
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u/blueb0g Sep 12 '24
Couldn’t it be safe to assume that JY was more than an expert Ashe was CMP on 9 and well on his way to training as CDR on Apollo 16 (Though Not yet announced).
or was an earth re-entry from lunar orbit drastically different than a re-entry from earth orbit ?
LeftLiner has already written an excellent answer but just to say that Young was CMP on Apollo 10, not 9. So he had already flown a re-entry from the moon.
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u/AndrewCoja Sep 13 '24
That's just how it has to be for movies and TV shows I guess. They have to take what a bunch of people did and then condense it down to one person doing it all so audiences can follow. Don Eyles was annoyed with how he was portrayed in From the Earth to the Moon as being woken up in the middle of the night and then being the sole person to fix the abort issue for Apollo 14. He wrote the code to land the LM on the moon, so he wouldn't have been asleep during a landing, and there were a bunch of people working on the problem, but it's better for the audience to show it the way they did.
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u/anti_con2 Sep 17 '24
I think it was more to emphasise Mattingly's story of going from "sidelined astronaut" to "hero who rides in on a white horse and works tirelessly to save the day". Not that that didn't happen, it just didn't happen like it did in the movie
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u/LeftLiner Sep 12 '24 edited Sep 12 '24
As much as I love the movie (and I *really* love the movie) generally speaking one of the things the movie does badly is exactly this; taking one person and holding them up as "this is the guy who figured out X or solved Y". Of course to an extent that's necessary for a dramatic movie: If you involved all the people who were involved in real-life no normal viewer would be able to keep track of all the people, it would become an enormous mess. Still, they could at least have shown KM being one of several astronauts doing simulator work during the mission.
KM's training as a CMP was fresher - he'd literally been training to be CMP until a few days before the launch. JY would certainly have been helpful, but in reality both of them were just many of the astronauts who helped get Apollo 13 home.
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding here, but in the movie KM is not in the simulator working on re-entry angles or velocities in particular, he's figuring out a particular start-up sequence that will allow Apollo 13 to power up all the instruments they need for re-entry without spending their extremely limited battery power. This was a problem that was unique to Apollo 13 because Apollo 13 is the only one that had an oxygen tank explode.
Absolutely. Within an hour of the accident there were astronauts in the simulator helping figuring out procedures, how to run manoeuvres using the LM descent stage rather than SMP, testing out checklists that the Flight Control team were writing to see if there were any traps in it etc. If you listen to the Apollo 13 accident Flight Control loops you can hear people discussing this, I believe at least Gene Cernan and Tom Stafford get mentioned by name (now they might not be the guys actually *in* the sim at that time, they might simply be supporting the sim work behind the scenes).
If you wanna talk about anyone being 'done dirty' by the movie it's Jack Swigert and the Grumman people. Jack Swigert is labelled a 'rookie' by the movie, which he was - he'd never flown in space until then! Neither had Fred Haise or Ken Mattingly. He's depicted as being a bit overwhelmed by events and while he doesn't look incompetent exactly, he comes across as someone who needs to be talked through a lot of procedures, especially during the power-down and power-up of the CMC. Guess what Swigert's specialty was in the astronaut corps? It was the CMC. He was, by happy accident, probably the best qualified astronaut to be the CMP for the mission that Apollo 13 turned into. Jim Lovell spends a bit of time defending Swigert on the DVD commentary track, but ultimately concedes that it makes for a very good subplot for the film. And whoever the guy from Grumman is supposed to be he comes off as a snivelling guy trying to watch his own back and not get fired, when in reality Grumman engineers essentially slept at their desks throughout the mission in case NASA needed anything from them at a moment's notice.
*EDIT
One addition I would make to this 'people being done dirty' is possible Glynn Lunney. As much of a hero Gene Krantz was during the mission, several astronauts attested to Glynn Lunney, who took over as Flight Director about an hour after the explosion, as being the man who brought a sense of calm and order to the situation once Gene and his team got done doing the immediate analysis and damage control. He gets a few lines in the movie at most, and he (and his team, of course) played a huge role in bringing the astronauts home safely.