It was 50 years ago Monday (April 13) that the Apollo 13 crew famously told NASA: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” You can celebrate the “successful failure” with a NASA documentary and other activities online.
On April 13, 1970, three astronauts on their way to the moon experienced an explosion in the service module of their spacecraft. To survive, they had to abandon their lunar-landing plans and make a four-day trip home with less oxygen and water than was ideal.
NASA isn’t planning in-person activities to commemorate the event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but has released a documentary with archival footage from the mission. Apollo 13: Home Safe includes interviews with Lovell (it opens with him saying “it was plagued by bad omens and bad luck from the very beginning…”) and conversations with Haise, NASA flight directors Gene Kranz and Glynn Lunney and engineer Hank Rotter. Swigert died in 1982. NASA has other social media activities planned as well.
A website called Apollo 13 in Real Time, the creation of Ben Feist, a contractor at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, is providing transcripts, video footage, and audio recordings from the mission posted at the times they occurred 50 years ago, including every word spoken by the astronauts on the mission. Much of the audio was digitized for the first time for this project.
And if you want to watch Ron Howard’s dramatic retelling of the mission (and you definitely should, it’s great for kids), his 1995 film Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks as Lovell, is available on Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Google Play and iTunes.
