Apollo 13 Analysis

Many problem skills had to be used and improvised during the movie, Apollo 13, but the one that amazed me was when Jim and Fred had to manually adjust the ship. I believe this held a significant amount of importance for getting the astronauts home. Everyone knew that to be able to reenter the earth’s atmosphere the ship only had a tiny amount of room for error. When NASA informed the astronauts that they needed to do another burn, but they don’t have enough power to start up the ship for the computers you could see the defeat in the astronauts’ eyes. By this point in the trip, the astronauts are suffering from exhaustion, starvation, lack of oxygen, and dwindling faith. Not only those symptoms set in, Fred was becoming rather ill and was having a hard time functioning correctly.
This minor problem is truly a major one when looking at the big picture. The astronauts have done all the work necessary to prepare for reentry only to find out that they were coming in too shallow of an angle. At that point in the astronauts’ flight there were no other alternatives for them. They only had two main choices, restart the ship to burn and chance they will have enough power to make it home or manually burn to adjust the ship to the correct angle. The advantages for turning on the ship to readjust during the burn is that the team would know where they need to be for reentry. The major disadvantage to turning on the computer was that the team may use up too much power to be able to turn the ship once they finish the burn. The advantages to doing a manual burn is that they wouldn’t be using any power during the burn. The disadvantage is that without having the computer system they were directing the ship with hardly any direction besides making sure the Earth was in their