Major stories and events
Apollo 13 still resonates in Houston and beyond.
By the time Apollo 13 launched in April 1970, Americans already had walked on the moon twice. So the latest mission to the moon was being treated as almost old hat, with none of the networks choosing to interrupt prime-time programming for the three-man crew’s broadcast about life on the orbiter.
However, shortly after the broadcast ended, an uneventful flight turned into a drama worthy of Homer. An explosion caused the loss of power, oxygen and water in the command module. The astronauts suddenly were facing death some 200,000 miles from Earth.
The mission became known as NASA’s most successful failure, one with near-mythic resonance in the national consciousness. Although the spacecraft didn’t reach the moon, astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert returned home safely with the help of many flight controllers and engineers in Houston. The six-day odyssey ended with the module splashing into the Pacific Ocean near the island of Samoa.
Whennaval officers aboard the USSIwo Jima “saw that we were safe, they radioed to Houston, and I kind of think they very quietly tore up the obituaries they had all planned for us,” Lovell told NPR decades later.
Only Lovell, the Navy pilot whocommanded Apollo 13, had flown in space previously. He was aboard Apollo 8, whose crew was the first to leave Earth’s gravitational pull and orbit the moon.
This time, Lovell and Haise had plans to be the fifth and sixth men to walk on the moon, with Swigert remaining in the module in orbit. Lovell later wrote that he had never felt more confident before a launch.
For the first two days, the mission unfolded with few issues, prompting one flight controller to rib the astronauts, “We’re bored to tears down here.”
Things started to go wrong nearly 56 hours into the flight. An oxygen tank in the rear service module exploded, and a second tank was failing. After seeing warning lights in the cockpit, Swigert radioed, “OK, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” Lovell then told Mission Control that there was a decrease in the electrical current of the spacecraft.
Once the liquid oxygen was gone from the tanks, so would go the electricity for the command module. The release was so rapid that the escaping gas could be seen by astronomers in Houston, according to NASAhistory.
With the loss of power, the lunar landing was aborted. Mission Control began scrambling to bring the astronauts back to Earth.
“The knot tightened in my stomach, and all regrets about not landing on the moon vanished,” Lovell wrote. “Nowit was strictly a case of survival.”
The crew took refuge in the cramped lunar module, which had enough food, water and oxygen to sustain two astronauts for nearly two days. The three menwere forced to stretch the supplies over four days as they circled the moon and used lunar gravity to angle them toward Earth with limited power.
The astronauts turned off the lights and heaters on the “lifeboat” to save power and reduced their daily water consumption to 6 ounces per person. The temperature dropped to 38 degrees inside the spacecraft.
In Houston, engineers devised a way for the crew to reduce dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in the spacecraft by using plastic bags, cardboard and duct tape, all materials found on board.
Flight controllers, meanwhile, developed a plan for the astronauts to return to the command module as they neared Earth. Unlike the lunar module, it had a heat shield for re-entering the planet’s atmosphere.
The command modulewas a “cold, clammy tin can” when the astronauts arrived, Lovell wrote. To power up the spacecraft, the Houston-based team developed procedures in three days, instead of the typical three months.
The spacecraft’s walls had so much condensation that it began to rain inside the module upon re-entry.
It splashed gently into the Pacific on April 17, 1970 — three days and 15 hours after the explosion had crippled the ship and transfixed the nation. By then, the astronauts had lost 31 pounds, with Lovell alone dropping 14 pounds. Haise also had developed an infection because of severe dehydration.
The next day in Houston, President Richard M. Nixon gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor — to the astronauts, flight directors and the rest of Apollo 13’s operations team.
There’s nothing routine about space flight, Lovell later said.
“Putting people atop thousands of pounds of high explosives and going at tremendous speeds and working in a vacuum and coming back in high temperatures is a risky business,” he said. “But it’s worth the risk, so let’s go. The only way you get someplace is to take risks.”
Lovell wrote a book about the near-catastrophe, “Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13,” which was published in 1994 and adapted for the Ron Howard film a year later. The movie “Apollo 13” topped the box office for three weeks and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including best picture.
TomHanks, whoplayed Lovell in the film, said at the time that the Apollo 13 story is as good as any ever told. “It’s one of the seven great stories in literature — how to get home,” he said.
The filmmakers used transcripts and recordings for dialogue between the astronauts and Mission Control. But the movie’s most famous line was an exception: “Houston, we have a problem.”
Hanks, as Lovell, said the words. But it was Swigert who first alerted the ground to the problem. After Mission Control asked for confirmation, Lovell repeated, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
The Hollywood version became ingrained in pop culture. It’s used by lazy headline writers and uttered by activists looking to make an accessible point about their particular issue.
“It just drifted into the public domain,” Lovell told the Houston Chronicle in 2005. “I still can’t believe it. I think that phrase is going to be around for a long time.”
Today, Lovell, 88, lives near Chicago, while Haise, 82, resides in Pasadena. Swigert died of complications of cancer in December 1982, just days before he was to be sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Colorado.