Nation: Apollo's Return: Triumph Over Failure

"My lord Odysseus," he replied, "spare me your praise of Death. Put me on earth again . . ."

—Homer

UNDER its cheerful orange-and-white parachutes, Odyssey came down gently in placid, warm, South Pacific waters. The ripples from that splash spread around the globe. For four days a fractured world inured to mass suffering and casual death had found common cause in the struggle to save three lives. The magic and mystery of space exploration, the realization that James Lovell, Fred Haise and John Swigert were not simply three Americans on a scientific mission but also humanity's envoys to the future, had served to bind men and nations in a rare moment of unity.

Perhaps the largest audience in history watched the return, participating through TV's intimacy in every moment of the final, fiery descent. Journey's end was safe and all according to script, in sharp contrast to the crisis of mid-voyage, which had been full of unprecedented danger and breathtaking improvisation. The devastated service module, original source of the deadly hazard, peeled off properly. Aquarius, the lunar module that had served as savior instead of explorer, unzipped easily. The command unit Odyssey touched down within four miles of the U.S.S. Iwo Jima. Helicopter recovery ticked along as if automated. Soon Lovell, Haise and Swigert were on the carrier's flight deck, hearing Rear Admiral Donald Davis say, "We're glad you made it, boys." The ship's chaplain said a prayer of thanksgiving, and the three astronauts joined him. In Houston, Marilyn Lovell touched the universal mood when she said: "It was beautiful."

James Lovell added his own benediction when the astronauts first set foot on land en route home. Welcomed by gaily-dressed Samoans on Pago-Pago, Lovell said: "We do not realize what we have on earth until we leave it."

Exploding Tank. Yet the previous voyages had seemed so effortless, the voyagers so confident, the supporting apparatus of men and equipment so efficient, the goals so bold and growing ever bolder, that a degree of hubris had developed. It was not so much frail human flesh against the vast challenge of space as it was technicians remembering the sequence of switches to throw. The world could be forgiven a touch of ennui.

Apollo 13's failure ended that. The exploding oxygen tank that could easily have cost the lives of Lovell, Haise and Swigert was a cruel but perhaps necessary reminder of the fallibility of man and his machines. The cause of the malfunction will have to be established by a painstaking inquiry. Meanwhile space exploration was humanized again, as it had been during the pioneer flights and on the night when Neil Armstrong made man's first footprint in moon dust. No longer was it an issue of U.S. technocracy, or how many billions the space program costs, or what the funds buy. Rather it was the guts, wits and will of a handful of men matched against the enormousness of space.