swigert called it. then there was a pause for about five seconds.hen lovell comes onboard, hey, houston, we've got a problem. within mission control, literally nothing made sense in those first few second because the controller's data had gone static briefly and then when it was restored, many of the parameters just didn't indicate anything that we had ever seen before. down in the propulsion area, my controllers all of a sudden saw a lot of jet activities. jets were firing. we then see lovell -- this is all happening in seconds. we then see lovell take control of the spacecraft and fly into an attitude so he can keep communicating with us. and for about 60 seconds, literally the calls kept coming in but they made no sense, they made no pattern, right on down the line, until finally the training that's giving the controllers kicked in. very meticulously they relayed the calls. lozmous' calls started recovering some of the functions that appeared to be lost in the spacecraft. i'd written the time of this event at 55 hours, 55 minutes, 4 seconds. i ca

mission control isn't going to admit we're emotional and the rookie onboard the spacecraft, jack swigert comes down and says all of us up here want to thank you guys down there for the fine job you did. and that sort of broke the ice and we got a few atta boys from lovell and hayes. then we go into blackout. blackout is the time period in the mission where the fire of the re-entry prevents communications to the spacecraft. by this time the program, we could nail it when it starts and when it finishes to within a second. and each controller during blackout -- this is an intensely lonely period because you're left -- the crew's on their own and they're left with the data that you gave them. maneuver data, attitude information, all these kind of things and each controller is going back through everything they did during the mission and was i right? and that's the only question in their mind. and there isn't any noise in here, you hear the electronics, you hear the hum of the air conditioning occasionally. in those days we used to smoke a lot. you'd hear a rasp of a zippo lighter as somebody