✓ EXTREME RATIONING—PRIORITIZE SURVIVAL
The answer was brutal: extreme rationing. The crew cut their own drinking water to almost nothing so the machines keeping them alive could stay cool.
The Rationing Plan:
6 ounces of water per person per day
- Apollo 13 ration: 6 ounces per day—about one-fifth of what they'd normally drink
- They stretched it with fruit juices and wet-pack foods like hot dogs
For comparison: 6 ounces is half a standard 12-ounce soda can—for a whole day.
The Consequences:
- 💧 Combined crew weight loss: 31.5 pounds total—Jim Lovell alone lost 14
- 💧 Fred Haise: Developed a painful kidney infection; his fever climbed to about 104°F, peaking around splashdown
- 💧 All crew: Days of constant thirst, cracked lips, and weakness
- 💧 Cruel irony: Condensation dripped from every cold wall—water they couldn't drink
- 💧 Equipment cooling: Kept to the bare minimum—an accepted risk
"It was estimated that the crew would run out of water about five hours before Earth re-entry... They cut down to six ounces each per day, 1/5 of normal intake."
— NASA's official Apollo 13 mission history
Result: They Made It!
Water lasted all the way home—28.2 pounds (about 9 percent of the supply) were still in the tanks at the end.
The rationing worked, and the electronics never overheated.
Why This Worked:
- ✓ Survival mindset: Crew accepted suffering to stay alive
- ✓ Equipment resilience: Systems survived on minimal cooling
- ✓ Shortened journey: The PC+2 burn cut about 10 hours of water consumption
- ✓ Medical care ready: Navy doctors treated the dehydrated crew right after splashdown
Why it was the right decision: They gambled that the crew and equipment could survive extreme rationing for nearly four days. It cost them—Fred Haise got the sickest of the three—but they reached the ocean with water to spare.
🎬 Dramatization — not a documented quote: the line often given to Lovell, "We were so thirsty... if we run out of water, we're dead," appears in no transcript or memoir.
📚 Sources for Skeptics
Not convinced the crew should have gone this thirsty? Questioning the trade-offs is exactly how engineers think. Dig into the mission record and decide for yourself:
