Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 7, 1995 TAG: 9507070008
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARCIA DUNN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. LENGTH: Medium
The star of the movie ``Apollo 13'' has more than four hours of zero-gravity under his spacesuit belt, all of it aboard NASA's KC-135 aircraft, also known as the Vomit Comet.
The KC-135 zooms up and down, alternating between 2-g, or twice the gravity on Earth, and brief spurts of weightlessness. This goes on and on and on until, well, you can imagine.
Director Ron Howard wanted realism and he got it.
``Ron Howard really followed it down the line,'' said Apollo 13's Jim Lovell, commander of the aborted moon mission. Some directors would have ``put this thing on Mars with David Bowie or something like that.''
``Apollo 13'' is based on Lovell's 1994 book, ``Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13.''
A quarter-century later, Apollo 13 remains NASA's only in-space disaster. An oxygen tank in the spaceship ruptured en route to the moon on April 13, 1970, and canceled what would have been the third manned lunar landing. Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert swung around the moon without stopping and made it back to Earth - barely.
Two-time Academy Award-winner Hanks stars as Lovell, with Bill Paxton as Haise and Kevin Bacon as Swigert.
The other ``actornaut'' - the astronauts' name for the actors - is Gary Sinise, who portrays Thomas ``Ken'' Mattingly. Mattingly was bumped off the flight after being exposed to measles.
``Tom Hanks has more weightless time in a zero-g airplane than any astronaut who ever flew,'' Apollo 15 commander David Scott, a technical adviser to the film, said during a visit to Cape Canaveral this spring.
``Good for him,'' interrupted Haise.
``Yeah, good for him,'' Scott said, laughing. ``At last count, he had over four hours at 20-second clips.''
That's a lot of ups and downs.
Besides flying on the KC-135 out of Johnson Space Center in Houston last year, the ``actornauts'' spent a few days at U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala., training in a shuttle mock-up and learning how to handle planes. They visited Kennedy Space Center and studied NASA films of the mission.
To further ensure accuracy, Lovell took Hanks up in his plane and invited him to his Horseshoe Bay, Texas, home. Haise strained to remember for the sound-effects crew what pumps and master alarms sounded like in space. Scott, the seventh man to walk on the moon, dug out his old flight checklists and Apollo operations handbook. (Swigert died of cancer in 1982.)
``By the middle of the movie, they [actors] were carrying these checklists around like they'd been doing it all their lives,'' Scott said.
At the same time, Space Works Inc., a subsidiary of the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kan., created replicas of the command module and lunar module. The replicas included some original Apollo 13 parts.
``It was absolutely exact down to every last rivet and piece of Velcro,'' said Max Ary, president and chief executive officer of the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Works. ``Even all of the gauges in the spacecraft worked.''
Each module had to come apart like ``a giant jigsaw puzzle'' to allow for a multitude of camera angles, Ary said. What's more, the modules that flew on the KC-135 had to be able to withstand up to 9-g in case of an emergency landing.
All told, Space Works provided about 8,000 parts for the movie, including pens, flashlights, checklists, hoses and spacesuits identical in appearance to the actual item used.
Similar care was taken in the actual filming.
Space Works discovered original, large-frame format films of Saturn 5 launches and offered it to Howard for his launch scenes. But he wasn't satisfied with the quality and opted for one-tenth scale models of the rocket and pad, enhancing these scenes by computer.
Howard also wanted to re-create the coldness and dampness inside the crippled spaceship. So for two months, the temperature inside the ``Apollo 13'' stages at Universal Studios in Los Angeles hovered around 38 degrees Fahrenheit.
The re-entry scenes were especially difficult.
Workers put boards under the crane that held the command module and shook the boards to mimic the vibration of a spaceship plunging through the atmosphere. Other workers fanned a fire and blew gas past the command module's windows to imitate the ionization of gases. Still others dripped water on the actors' faces to depict the condensation that shook loose as the real spacecraft hurtled toward the Pacific Ocean.
As for Mission Control, the room was re-created right down to the vents in the ceiling and the drinking fountain on the wall.
The result, as Scott sees it, is a tribute not just to Apollo 13 but the entire Apollo program.
``I don't think NASA itself could ever have put together anything that would portray the space program as well as this film,'' Scott said.
``This is, if you want to call it, a good human interest story,'' Haise added. ``It had a good ending, I'm here, and I think in that sense I hope it helps the space program.''
by CNB