In the day of the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13, and to remember the events that defined the "successful failure", we are providing in our archive (see Downloads) the full high-quality scan of the Apollo 13 As Flown Flight Plan. This document was a re-edition of the Section 3 of the Apollo 13 Flight Plan, called Timeline, and provide minute-by-minute a listing of all the major events that characterized the flight.

The flight

Starting at 00:00:00 hours with the launch, we can re-live the events, as they unfolded, in typical flight plan format, with the different tasks highlighted for each crew member and MCC Houston. Even for the nominal portion of the flight we find interesting details about how those portions of the flight were flown.

At about 55:50:00 hours, just at the end of the LM Familiarization phase, we find the beginning of all the troubles and the first part of the crisis. We follow the events, thinking about the frantic activities and dialogues to get an understanding of the situation and the first realization that the SM was lost, until 57:36:00 hours when the LM is beginning to be activated. At 58:00:00 the CSM is fully powered down. Now the second part of the crisis begins.

In the following hours we learn about the maneuvers performed to accomplish the free-return trajectory and the ways that LM equipments were used in order to save energy and other consumables. A chance to at least perform a photographic survey of the Moon is not lost during the fly-by. At about 80:30:00 the CO₂ monitor generates the first alarm and at about 90:00:00 we learn about the procedures to adapt CM LiOH canisters.

At about 120:00:00 hours events starts to pile-up again, with the charging of CM batteries from LM's ones, the final trajectory corrections and the arrangements for the never imagined CM+LM combined flight after the separation of the SM. And this until the successful spashdown at 142:54:56 hours which ended the odyssey of the crew, of their families, of the flight controllers and of all those people in the world that witnessed those events. Once more an Apollo mission flew not only for the United States, but for all the people in the world that dreamed about space exploration.

The document

The scan provided in our archive refers to a document which we considers to be pretty unique as we do not have any other references about it. The author is also unknown and it is generically traced to the Flight Planning Branch at JSC. Presumably this was one of the documents drafted to support the investigation after the Apollo 13 flight, as we never found similar documents for the other flights.

The original is perfectly preserved albeit the pages are not perfectly printed (the alignment of the text is sometimes skewed) but perfectly readable. It has been found stapled, without any cover or attached memo, among other papers of astronaut Jack Swigert's collection. This collection is now stored at the Research Library of the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, in Denver, where it is undergoing cataloguing activities.

We think this is a small treasure and we are happy to provide it, as usual, for free. We guarantee the completeness of the document, its authenticity, and the scan is, as usual, of very high-quality.

Enjoy it and use it in the next few days to follow "in real-time" the events of those days, 40 years later. And if you care to drop a comment, please feel free to do so.