We all remember the famous movie with Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon, but what exactly did happen on that journey which was supposed to land on the moon?
The Apollo 13 mission was the third mission headed to the moon, but as we all know, as a result of the malfunctioning equipment on board, the mission couldn’t land.
The original crew was changed around a few times before they set off, but perhaps the most dramatic change was the one which involved Kenneth Mattingly being grounded just days before the launch as a result of being exposed to German measles from another one of the crew, Charles Duke. This meant that John L. Swigert was sent up instead, joining Jim Lovell and Fred Haise aboard the spacecraft.
The launch itself was a success and the flight was going extremely well at first, so much so that the capsule commander on duty, Joe Kerwin, said that the spacecraft was doing so well that “We’re bored to tears down here.”
However, as the crew were making their way towards the moon, they turned on the fans in the oxygen tank, which was greeted with a loud bang. This was the noise of one of the oxygen tanks exploding, and as they were over 200,000 miles away from Earth, things weren’t looking great.
Contacting the ground team at Houston, Swigert and Lovell uttered the famous phrase: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
As a result of the explosion, the crew had to shut down a lot of the systems on board and use the lunar module as a kind of lifeboat to get themselves back to Earth. They needed the resources on board to last for 90 hours, when they were only designed to last for 45 hours, as it was only supposed to drop them to the moon.
On the mission, as they had already begun to turn towards the moon to make a landing, they needed to go around it to come back and in the process they broke the record for the furthest human spaceflight from Earth as they rounded the far side of the moon before returning home.
The whole crew did arrive back to Earth safely, splashing down in the South Pacific Ocean, where they were recovered by the USS Iwo Jima.
In 1995, the event became the subject of the huge box office and critically successful movie Apollo 13, based on a book written by Lovell and author Jeff Kluger. It seems the movie was accurate to the real event, although it did (slightly) change that famous quote on purpose, which means we’ve been saying it wrong all these years!
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