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With the power all but off in the spacecraft, the cabin heater is offline, and the spacecraft begins to lose heat to the coldness of space. The astronauts are forced to manually pulse the attitude control jets to maintain as much of the cabin in sunlight as possible. The controls are unpredictable, as they were not designed for steering the LEM with a 60,000 pound command and service module attached to it. The astronauts are forced to relearn how to fly their ship.
Soon another serious problem arises. While there is sufficient oxygen in the spacecraft, the system for scrubbing out the excess carbon dioxide will soon fail. It was never designed to handle three astronauts for extended time. The LEM system uses round scrubber cartridges, and they're all used up. The Command Module has a similar system, but the cartridges for it are square. The engineers back in Houston at Mission Control are facing a classic conundrum. How do you put a square peg in a round hole?
The engineers succeed in using tape, cardboard, and hoses known to be in the spacecraft to construct an adapter for the square cartridges. The instructions are relayed to the astronauts, and another crisis has been averted.
Houston continues to monitor the spacecraft trajectory, and discovers that it is slipping out of the allowable window. The astronauts are forced to perform yet another Aquarius burn. This time there's no computer guidance system to assist them. It is necessary for two astronauts to control this burn. Fred Haise uses the backup controller to adjust the spacecraft's yaw while James Lovell uses the primary controller to adjust pitch and roll.
