December 14, 2023 – Apollo 13

Happy Throwback Thursday! Today’s throwback year in 1970, and that was the year of Apollo 13. It was meant to be the third crewed mission to land on the moon. But everything changed when, about 55 hours after liftoff, one of the oxygen tanks exploded, causing the other to fail as well. The Apollo 13 astronauts were commander James Lovell (the world’s most traveled astronaut at the time), lunar module pilot Fred Haise, and command module pilot Jack Swigert.
The spacecraft was 200,000 miles above Earth when the oxygen tank blew up. It took out the command module’s normal electricity, light, and water supply. The crew notified mission control, with Swigert’s famous words, “Houston, we’ve had a problem”. It’s worth noting that in the 1995 film, the line was changed to “Houston, we have a problem”.
The moon landing was aborted and instead, a plan was made to loop around the moon to return to Earth. On the ground, NASA engineers and statisticians raced to figure out a way to get the crew safely back to Earth. An hour after the explosion, the crew was told to move into the lunar module. It was a tight squeeze- it was only designed to fit 2 people for 45 hours, and it needed to support 3 men for at least 90 hours. To preserve power, all non-essential systems were shut down. Without heat, the temperature quickly dropped to around 38 degrees. Some of their food went bad, and water had to be rationed to make sure the spacecraft would have enough liquid to cool down its hardware. The 3 astronauts lost 31 pounds among them.
Amazingly, the spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 17, 1970. An estimated 40 million Americans watched, as all 3 networks covered it live. President Nixon later awarded the crew the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
None of the Apollo 13 astronauts flew in space again. But they did set a Guinness World Record! At one point, Apollo 13 was on the far side of the moon, 158 miles from the lunar surface and around 250,000 miles above Earth. That set the record for the farthest distance from Earth reached by humans. Learn more here.