One-Man Army!

Peter Obi with the European Union ambassador at his home in Onitsha.

On this day 56 years ago, three men fell from the sky in a freezing, half-dead spacecraft and landed in the Pacific Ocean. They had been given almost no chance of coming home alive. Six days earlier, astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise launched on Apollo 13, heading for the Moon. Two days into the flight, 200,000 miles from Earth, an oxygen tank exploded and tore a hole in the side of their ship. Within minutes, they were losing oxygen, losing power, and losing heat. There was no plan for this. No one had trained for it. The Moon landing was abandoned. The only question now was whether three men could survive long enough to get home. Their main ship was dying, so they climbed into a smaller attached craft that was only designed to land on the Moon. It was built for two people for two days. They had to make it last four days for three. The temperature inside dropped to 3 degrees Celsius. Water droplets covered every surface. They rationed drinking water to six ounces per man per day, less than a single cup. Jim Lovell lost 14 pounds in four days. Then the air started going bad. The filters that clean carbon dioxide from the air were running out. Without new ones, the crew would suffocate. The spare filters from the main ship were the wrong shape. Square filters. Round slots. Engineers on the ground grabbed the same materials the astronauts had on board, plastic bags, cardboard, duct tape, and a sock, and built a makeshift adapter on a desk. Then they talked the crew through building an identical one while floating in zero gravity, 200,000 miles away. It worked. To get home, they had to swing around the far side of the Moon and fire their engine at the exact right second. Too steep and they would burn up entering Earth’s atmosphere. Too shallow and they would bounce off it and drift into space forever. The entire world stopped. Over 40 million people watched on television. The Pope led prayers from the Vatican. On April 17, 1970, the spacecraft hit the atmosphere. For four minutes, all radio contact went silent. The heat of re-entry surrounds a spacecraft in a layer of superheated gas that blocks all signals. Controllers on the ground called out. Nothing. The silence stretched past the expected time. One minute late. Still nothing. At one minute and 28 seconds past the deadline, a voice broke through. The parachutes opened. The capsule hit the water. All three men were alive. They never reached the Moon. But the mission became the greatest rescue in the history of space travel. It proved that the most dangerous moment in any journey is not the one you prepare for. It is the one nobody saw coming. Jim Lovell never flew in space again. He never walked on the Moon. Years later, when asked if he considered himself unlucky, he said: “I think of the crew of Apollo 1, who died in a fire before they ever left the ground. I think of the crews who never got to fly at all. No, I regard Apollo 13 as a triumph.”