Kranz inquired of Liebergot how things were going. Liebergot replied that the crew were "flipping their fuel cells around"- trying to reconfigure them. Kranz was impatient: "Well, let's get some recommendation here, Sy, if you got any better ideas."
Just then Swigert reported the inexplicable and disconcerting news that they were getting an undervolt on Main Bus A, the one that until now had still been working. "Sy," Kranz said, the exasperation in his voice now unmistakable, "what do you want to do? Hold your own and - " Kranz broke off to listen to the spacecraft, which was adding that Main B was "reading zip," distributing no power at all. Still nothing from Liebergot. "Sy," Kranz said, "have you got a sick-sensor type problem there or what?"
Liebergot had been busy talking to his back room. He now came onto Flight's loop and recommended that the crew try to reconnect the fuel cells that, Liebergot hoped, had been thrown off line by the mysterious jolt. CapCom passed the instruction up to the crew while Liebergot returned to the EECOM loop that connected him to his back room. Remembering that O2 pressure reading, Liebergot called to Sheaks. "Larry, you don't believe that O2 Tank 1 [sic] pressure, do you?" Sheaks came back confidently. "No, no. Surge tank's good. Manifold's good, E.C.S. is good." Reassured, Liebergot went back to the screens and to a discussion of the electrical problem with Dick Brown.
Odyssey came back on the line. "Okay, Houston, I tried to reset and Fuel Cell 1 and 3 are both showing gray flags. But they are both showing zip on the flows."
"I copy, Flight," Liebergot said unhappily, indicating that he had heard the crew's transmission. This had to be an instrumentation problem. They couldn't possibly be having a simultaneous failure in two independent fuel cells - especially since, he had just been reassured, the oxygen was doing fine. And yet every time he got a new reading on the fuel cells, their condition seemed to be deteriorating.
"Okay, what do you want to do?" Kranz asked.
Liebergot suppressed an impulse to reply, "I want to go home." He passed along a new configuration of linkups between fuel cells and buses that would reveal this problem for what he hoped it was: some blown circuitry that they could work around.
From Murray & Cox "Apollo"
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