'O.K., 13, this is Houston. It appears to us that we're losing O2 flow through fuel cell three, so we want you to close the reac valve on fuel cell three. You copy?' In Odyssey, Lovell, Swigert, and Haise heard this command and paused in what they were doing. None of the three men had harbored any illusions that their mission was anything but aborted, but to hear it come up to them in the form of this simple, clipped directive, to hear it made official like this, still stopped them cold. 'Did I hear you right?' Haise, the electrical specialist, asked Lousma. 'You want me to shut the reac valve on fuel cell three?' 'That's affirmative,' Lousma answered. 'You want me to go through the whole smash for fuel cell shutdown?' 'That's affirmative.' Haise turned to Lovell and nodded sadly. 'It's official,' said the astronaut who until just an hour ago was to have been the sixth man on the moon. 'It's over,' said Lovell, who was to have been the fifth. 'I'm sorry,' said Swigert, who would have overseen the mother ship in lunar orbit while his colleagues walked. 'We did everything we could.'
Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13
