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FAST FORWARD: An Emergency Call to Tom Kelly: There's Trouble on Apollo 13

By Michael Dorman

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On April 13, 1970, nine months after the first lunar landing, another spacecraft on a manned moon mission was speeding through the heavens 205,000 miles from Earth. Suddenly, there was a loud bang. There had been an explosion in a liquid oxygen tank aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft, endangering the flight and its three astronauts -- James Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert.

Thomas J. Kelly, the Grumman engineer known as the father of the LEM spacecraft, was on temporary leave at the time to take a management course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An urgent telephone call asked him to return immediately to Grumman's Bethpage headquarters and help direct attempts to rescue the astronauts.

Kelly quickly chartered an airplane and flew to Bethpage. There, he worked ceaselessly for three days to find a way to bring the astronauts safely back. Teaming with John Aaron, a NASA mission controller, Kelly refined various rescue suggestions -- making adjustments to meet objections by various experts that this plan or that was too ambitious or impractical. In the end, all the work succeeded. The astronauts made a safe emergency return to Earth.

For the broad range of his work on the space program, Kelly was awarded NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal in 1973.

Now 79 and retired, Kelly lives in Cutchogue. He peers often through a telescope perched in his living room -- capturing glimpses of waterfowl taking flight over Peconic Bay. That seems only appropriate for a man who devoted much of his working life to devising means of flight -- to the moon and back.

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