The Apollo 16 astronaut who helped save Apollo 13’s crew

Ken Mattingly was devastated when he was bumped from Apollo 13— but having him on the ground may have saved the mission. Mattingly had trained for months to serve on the 1970 trip to the moon. He was in his car when he heard on the radio that fellow astronaut Jack Swigert would be the command-module pilot instead, because a blood test had shown that Mattingly had been exposed to measles. “I just kind of pulled over to the side of the road and sat there for a while,” Mattingly said in 2001. “If this is a practical joke, it’s really well done, but I don’t think this is a joke.” The rocket blasted off without him. Three days later, an oxygen-tank explosion damaged the spacecraft, stranding the Apollo 13 astronauts 200,000 miles from Earth. From a command center in Houston, Mattingly worked round the clock to help engineer a way to get the astronauts home safely using the lunar-landing module.

Raised in a Miami suburb, where his father worked as an Eastern Airlines mechanic, Mattingly was obsessed with flight from an early age, said The Washington Post. He and his dad were “master builders of paper airplanes,” testing them at a park now named for him. After studying aeronautical engineering at Auburn University on a Navy scholarship, he became a naval aviator. Then, at the height of the space race in the late 1960s, Mattingly transferred to NASA, supporting the Apollo 8 mission and training as a backup command pilot for the Apollo 11 mission. After the failure of Apollo 13, he “finally set off for the moon” in 1972, with Apollo 16, said The Guardian. He later commanded space-shuttle missions and retired as a rear admiral, going to work for private aerospace companies.

But Mattingly is most remembered “for the flight he didn’t make,” said The New York Times. He was played by Gary Sinise in the hit 1995 movie Apollo 13, though he maintained that the film “overembellished” his role. For him personally, he said one of his most exciting moments came during Apollo 16. He had lost his wedding ring somewhere in the spacecraft and then, returning from a spacewalk, spotted it floating out the hatch into space. “I grabbed it, and we put it in the pocket,” he said. “We had the chances of a gazillion to one.”