50 years ago, today, Mission Commander Jim Lovell and two other astronauts, John Swigert, and Fred Haise, set off for the moon in Apollo 13. At that moment, the trio did not know that they would never make it to the moon, and they definitely didn’t know the history they were making and how iconic their simple sentence of worry, “Houston, we have a problem”, would become. As they were about to call it a night on the evening on April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank exploded in their vessel, 200,000 miles away from Earth’s surface. Haise has compared the sound it made to a barrel being hit by a sledgehammer, shocking the whole team. When one oxygen tank exploded, another was not far after. Being two oxygen tanks down, the team knew they would need Houston Mission Control Center’s help reevaluating their end destination.
The explosion killed their service module of the aircraft, which housed supplied their oxygen, power, water, as well as the propulsion and maneuvering systems. They knew that they would not have enough time to get to the moon and back, so they had to return straight to Earth...but how? Instead of landing on the moon, they had to use the moon’s gravity to set them on their path back home. They had to turn off all unnecessary equipment to save energy and they had to burn parts of the vessel so they could land on Earth correctly and not miss the planet completely. When they landed back on Earth, the spacecraft was half the size they started with. The “lifeboat” they had created had no heat, and the carbon dioxide levels were increasing.
The team was able to get their newly refined module at the exact angle they needed so they would not bounce off the Earth’s atmosphere using the sun’s position for orientation and pitch. They no longer had a computer to help them. They approached every problem calmly and did everything they had to do to get back to Earth’s surface safely. The mission was deemed a “successful failure” because even though they were not able to land on the moon, they were able to get themselves back home.
This was just a quick over view of what happened on the Apollo 13 mission, but there is more information through the stories which have been told about it by the survivors. In 1995, Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton took the rolls on the Apollo 13 crew in the movie Apollo 13 directed by Ron Howard. This movie, though it is a Hollywood adaptation, is shockingly accurate.
Along with this movie about Apollo 13 specifically, another ‘can’t miss’ space movie is the 2016 Hidden Figures. Continue to celebrate the Year of the Women with the movie that shows three African-American women at NASA who serve as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. Another thing to check out it NASA’s podcast Houston We Have a Podcast. In episode 139, from just last week, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise are interviewed, recalling their memories of the fateful mission.