Like many things, lightning likes to find the path with the least resistance, and it's very consistent about this. Under those stormy circumstances that morning over Florida, that path passed directly through the highly-ionized path the rocket was forging on its way to space, now at about 400 feet per second.As the astronauts sped through the storm about a mile and a half up, traveling faster than the speed of sound, the clouds' electrical charge had given way. A lightning bolt, carrying up to a hundred thousand amps and a hundred million volts, had struck the capsule and passed down the metal exterior of the rocket, riding its fiery, highly ionized plume all the way to the Earth. Unbeknownst to anyone at that moment, their spaceship had just become history's highest and fastest lightning rod. And, contrary to the old myth that lightning never strikes the same place twice, it was about to happen again.Unbeknownst to anyone, their spaceship had just become history's highest and fastest lightning rod.
"God darn Almighty!" Gordon exclaimed. "Wasn't that something, babe?""We're all chuckling up here over the lights," Bean said. "There were so many on we couldn't read em. [Long pause]""Well, I'll tell you one thing," said Conrad, "this is a first-class ride, Houston."Conrad chuckled. 'I think we need to do a bit more all-weather testing.'
The harrowing return
If we had [the astronauts] enter [the Earth] now they'd get killed earlier than if we sent them to the moon and let them do whatever else they're doing there and then come back 10 days later. And if their parachutes don't work then, well… At least they've had 10 days in a great adventure.
Lightning and lightning-fast thinking
Aaron noted another ingredient in the lightning bolt affair, and in his lightning-fast intervention, and it was one that seemed to contradict NASA's findings."Luck plays a part," he said. "Now, it was not only luck that at a pad test I saw that, an inappropriate sequence was being executed in a pad test, it was also the luck that it would happen during the launch phase and that I was the flight controller. If you had had any other EECOM there, they didn't see that pattern. But it's digging in with that kind of curiosity of why things do what they do and how things interreact was the motivation for why I think I became a good flight controller."Aaron's curiosity and some untold measure of luck would help him a year later, when he was called on to help rescue the nearly-doomed Apollo 13 mission. Aaron developed the innovative power-up sequence that allowed the Command Module to return to Earth on very limited power, and save another group of astronauts.By that time, Aaron's "SCE to Aux" rescue had already become part of NASA legend, and earned him what was said to be the highest of the agency's nerdy, innuendo-rimmed compliments: the nickname "steely-eyed missile man."Somehow, that just doesn't quite do justice to the man who saved Apollo from the ferocity of Zeus.It's digging in with that kind of curiosity of why things do what they do and how things interreact.
Read more: How to Fake a Moon Landing
How to Mathematically Predict Lightning Strikes
How Challenger Exploded, and Other Mistakes Were Made
The Mystery of the 'Only Camera to Come Back from the Moon'
The Mission to the Moon As You've Likely Never Seen It Before…and watch more: Space Shuttle Parking Lot: Tailgating the Rocket Launch__
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