
Apollo 13: the Towing Invoice (2007) - privong
https://web.archive.org/web/20071031080918/http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/4411/apollo13.htm
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bigtimber
Yes, the ??? on line 2 is KWH. You can see this clearly at:
[https://historical.ha.com/itm/explorers/space-
exploration/ap...](https://historical.ha.com/itm/explorers/space-
exploration/apollo-13-an-original-typed-copy-of-the-legendary-towing-bill-
sent-to-north-american-rockwell-by-grumman-signed-by-both-jame/a/6129-52241.s)

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monocasa
I've heard on the grapevine here in Boulder that Apollo 13's infamous tank,
when being transferred between Beech Aircraft and Rockwell, was dropped about
a foot. Beech Aircraft wanted to scrap the whole tank and red tagged it, but
were overruled by project managers at NASA since they couldn't point to
anything wrong in some tests of the tank.

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katastic
[https://www.space.com/8193-caused-
apollo-13-accident.html](https://www.space.com/8193-caused-
apollo-13-accident.html)

>In October 1968, the Number 2 tank eventually used on Apollo 13 was at the
North American Aviation plant in Downey, California. There, technicians who
were handling the tank accidentally dropped it about two inches. After testing
the tank, they concluded the incident hadn't caused any detectable damage.

>The dropped tank was eventually cleared for flight and installed in Apollo
13. The tank passed all of its routine prelaunch tests. But at the end of
March 1970, after a practice session called the Countdown Demonstration Test,
ground crews tried to empty the tank -- and couldn’t.

>The small tube used to fill and empty the tank of its super-cold contents had
been damaged by the mishandling almost two years earlier.

Looks like it was two problems that came together. The heating insulation /
voltage-change oversight wouldn't have triggered unless they also had to work
around the jammed pipe.

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monocasa
That's more or less consistent with what I've heard, with the added part that
the Beech Aircraft engineers who designed the thing never wanted it to make
it's way into a spacecraft. Their opinion was there was no way to certify the
thing again; it wasn't designed to be serviced, so NASA would just have to
wait for the next tank and delay the Apollo program. The stupid hacks all
pointed to finding existing damage from the drop that had been missed when
NASA's engineers tried to re-cert the tank that Beech wouldn't.

But hey PMs feeling pressure on timelines will ignore engineers'
recommendations, roll the dice and just push to prod anyway. And find some
engineers who'll back them up who had nothing to do with the original design.
Some things never change.

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digi_owl
Seems very similar to why Challenger blew up as well.

Engineers felt unease about launching in such cold weather, but management
rammed approval through.

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gknoy
I read a really interesting article on this in my undergraduate software
engineering course (an excerpt from Tufte's excellent "Visual Explanations"
book dealing with the shuttle Challenger mishap).

The main takeaway was not that it was malicious management, but rather that
the _way the information was portrayed_ (slides) did a remarkably poor job of
showing the relationship between temperature and booster failure. No one
showed management a graph of, _"Here's a chart of failures vs temperature, and
this is how cold is is today ..."_

Looking at the memos and slides that were presented up the chain, it's not
very surprising that the correlation between temperature and failure was lost
on its way up the bureaucracy.

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pdonis
Any reading of Tufte's claims about the Challenger launch decision should be
accompanied by reading this article, one of whose authors is Roger Boisjoly,
one of the Thiokol engineers who recommended against the launch:

[https://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf](https://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf)

tl/dr: Tufte's analysis itself exemplifies the charge Tufte makes. Tufte
presents the wrong information about the way the decision was made, in the
wrong way, and that is what drives his conclusions. When the right information
is presented in the right way, it is clear that the Thiokol engineers did
everything they possibly could, and that it was indeed a case of management
overruling good recommendations by engineers.

The article also gives very important background information: Thiokol had
previously recommended grounding the Shuttle until issues with the O-rings
that had surfaced on previous flights could be understood. NASA refused. So
during the discussion the night before the Challenger launch, Thiokol could
not make a number of arguments that would have seemed simpler and easier,
taken in isolation--because they had already made those arguments and had them
rejected.

~~~
gknoy
Oh, wow, thank you for sharing that!

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cyberferret
I love hearing about these sorts of invoices between agencies and armed
services etc. I guess it is the equivalent of macabre dark humour used by
emergency service personnel and medical staff - a way to cope with the daily
stress and trials of the job.

Many decades ago, the US Air Force donated a B-52 to our local aviation
museum. There were some issues around 'procurement of foreign military
equipment' and import laws, I believe, so to get around that, the US had to
issue an invoice to Australia to formalise the purchase of the aircraft.
Proudly displayed in a glass case next under the nose of the huge bomber is an
official US Dept. of Defence invoice. Total value $1.00 for the plane.

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ben1040
[https://twitter.com/TheRealBuzz/status/627895978796916736](https://twitter.com/TheRealBuzz/status/627895978796916736)?

See also, the joke "customs declaration" filed by the Apollo 11 astronauts.

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twic
I'm not sure why this link is to an archive of an ancient Geocities site,
given that there are a number of copies of this around. Here's the text
(although the image link is broken):

[https://everything2.com/title/Apollo+13+towing+bill](https://everything2.com/title/Apollo+13+towing+bill)

The only thing i didn't understand was the "modified American plan", which
apparently means they only got two meals a day:

[http://www.happy-journey.com/demystifying-hotel-plans-ap-
vs-...](http://www.happy-journey.com/demystifying-hotel-plans-ap-vs-map-vs-cp-
vs-ep/204)

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nielsbot
Pretty sure `???` on line 2 is `KWH` or kilowatt-hours

~~~
FabHK
Nice. `kWh` would be correct, I'd think, but it does look like `KWH`.

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overcast
Classic.

