If I were an astronaut in that situation I’d be outside beating on the defective part with a wrench up to the very last.
I guess we can argue the definition of “held out” and I was off by a couple of day above. CSM power down/LSM power up happened at GET (Ground Elapsed Time) 57-58h. The crew began working on the scrubber fix at GET 86h, so the scrubbers held out for 28 or so hours. Given that they were working at 150% of nominal operating mode, that ain’t bad.
Well, even encumbered by a space suit the body would have only weighed 70 or so pounds in moon gravity (perhaps more with a space suit) but it wouldn’t have been very hard to to get it back on the rover and back to the shuttle. Although it may have been kind of poetic to take the suit and leave the body on the moon. If it were already dead it wouldn’t explosively decompress and it would never rot. If I had t choose a place to be buried, that would be pretty cool.
yes but within parameters that can be lifted by the shuttle, there are certain things that just cant be included. There are only like fourteen quadrillion variables in a space flight, some of them don’t kill you but you can’t plan for all of them that do.
More like 30 pounds or so - lunar surface gravity is one-sixth Earth’s. Mind you, how easy it is to shoulder something like that when you’ve dropped five-sixths of your own weight is another matter; you’ve little weight of your own to help you keep your balance.
If I’m already dead then vent my suit gently and sit me with my back to a rock facing Earth. I’ll stare at the homeworld pretty much unchanged for the rest of human civilization (once I’m done dessicating).
Yep. If I could have a say upon dying on the moon (assuming I’m still in one piece), I’d wish my fellow astronaut lay me in a small shallow crater, and write my epitaph into the moon dust over my head. Positioning a good sized moon rock in my hands, over my heart/chest.
It would last for millennia or more (considering little meteor bombardment, and future generations do not disturb my “grave”).
How cool to be the first man interred on the Moon?
I would want to be a science experiment. Break the seal on my suit to freeze dry me, and leave me out in the open. Every century or so, come back and snap some pictures and take a few cell samples to see how a near perfect vacuum affects the decay of meat.
Space Cowboys, anyone? 
Surreal as it is, I love that last sequence, set to Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon.’
I just watched the movie a few weeks ago, and I agree that the movie implied that that’s what happened, but I can’t quite figure out how that would have happened, given that (a) they must have had pre-calculated abort sequences and (b) those abort sequences would not include moon rock weight.
Maybe because they had to use the LM’s rocket, and none of the abort plans had ever considered that the CM rocket wouldn’t be used to abort.
The Apollo 13 movie did not accurately depict the mid-course corrections. There were two major course corrections made after the explosion. The first was made before the computer was powered down, and was the one which was done to put Apollo 13 back on a trajectory which would return it to earth. The second major course correction, the PC+2 burn, was the first one done without computer control. The purpose of that burn was simply to speed up the capsule and get back to earth faster. They then did three more minor course corrections as the ship returned to earth.
It wasn’t really a matter of ‘forgot to account for the missing weight of the moon rocks’ because, as pointed out, the entire return trajectory was according to an abort plan which has been worked out well in advance. At least one of the course corrections was apparently due to sublimating vapor from a cooling system, something that hadn’t been taken into account because the lunar module cooling system isn’t normally working (or present) during the return to earth cruise phase.
There’s some discussion and information on the course corrections here:
http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php/38230-Apollo-13-fuel-burn-times?