40 years ago today

Fourty years ago today, at around the time I am writing this, three men were on their way to Moon. their Apollo spacecraft was state of the art. They had been on the way to the Moon three days and everything was going normally. The media didn't even bother to run the TV show they broadcast from about halfway between the Moon and the Earth. Having concluded their broadcast they got ready to close down for the night. There were a few "housekeeping procedures" they had to perform. Jack Swigert flicked a switch he had turned many times before. The current flowed through the wires and stirred the slushy liquid oxygen in tank number 2. What he didn't know was that in a previous incident several years before, the tank had been overheated and the wires in the tank were bare. A spark flew and the pure oxygen exploded into a fire. The explosion damaged all the other tanks in the Service Module and the vehicle was now useless.

What happened next was a triumph of technology and innovation which allowed them to safely return to the Earth. That triumph became NASA's finest hour.