From bob haller:
Obviously the crew had no way to get home. Would apollo continued to
possibly recover the astronauts bodies? was there any way to even get
the bodies home?

Were there any plans for such a sad event? Or one where the LM crew
gets stranded on the surface? leaving the CM pilot to come home alone?

yeah i know its a gruesome topic but do wonder if there were any plans
for such outcomes?

would the 13 SM defect had been found with a crew stuck in orbit?

Bob, I never saw anyone give you a direct complete answer, so I'll give you mine here...

You say, "Obviously the crew had no way to get home." Oh, really? The LM is not stuck. They just fly up for a normal rendezvous with the CSM. And why would the CSM/LM combination be stuck? There is absolutely no proof that the O2 tank rupture caused any damage whatsoever to the SPS.

Remember that Kranz's reason for not doing a Direct Abort was because of his "gut feeling" (imagine Stephen Colbert as a Flight Director making critical decisions, not letting his brain get in the way). And here's a video where Chris Kraft tells us emphatically that he wanted to do an SPS Direct Abort as soon as possible:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNY3xgyzNYA

They could have done this on April 14th during Trans-Lunar Coast, and if the tank rupture would have happened while Lovell & Haise were walking on the Moon, they could have fired the SPS engine while in lunar orbit.

The first problem I see in your asking the question is that you asked if the "tank had exploded" with the LM on the surface. Anyone who reads the key detailed info provided in the report, they will see that the investigation never arrived at any conclusion that the O2 tank exploded, or that there was any explosion whatsoever. Even Sy's report is posted as a pdf and his graph as a foldout is marked with the words indicating that the O2 tank ruptured, not exploded.

These are the facts that we were given in 1970. No matter what anyone may have called it in subsequent years, it does not change the best facts we have available of what happened during the mission.

If there was no explosion enroute to the Moon, we can expect that the same safety mechanisms of pressure relief, etc would have worked similarly while the CSM was orbiting around the Moon. This gives rise to the expectation that Chris Kraft maintains that the SPS was a usable engine, and this would have gotten the crew back to Earth in one piece.


As for what the plan was if some *other* event had happened where the crew would have been unable to have their bodies returned, I don't know what the plan was (as I've shared further down in this thread). An easy guess is that NASA would have just left everything as it was, or if they had some automatic ability to fire a thruster then there would have been some ceremonial way of doing that, bringing families into the Front Room, or whatever. Yes, a morbid topic. Maybe NASA's plan was to cross that bridge when they came to it. They sure had plenty enough on their plate without needing to walk very far down THAT contingency path in advance.

~ CT