On April 11, 1970, the Apollo 13 mission launched. Intended to be the third lunar landing, it was crewed by Commander Jim Lovell, who had flown previously on Apollo 8, and Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, both on their first spaceflights. Despite a last-minute crew change – Swigert was an eleventh-hour replacement for Ken Mattingly, who had been sidelined by exposure to German measles – lunar missions had already become routine, and the crew’s live television broadcast on April 13 wasn’t even carried on the three major TV networks.
But only 10 minutes after the broadcast ended, 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) from Earth, an oxygen tank in the Service Module exploded. The explosion damaged two of the three fuel cells and drained the spacecraft’s oxygen, forcing the crew to abort the Moon landing, power down the Command Module (CM), and move into the Lunar Module (LM), which was treated as their “lifeboat.”
No longer routine, the mission kept the attention of the world as NASA and the Apollo 13 crew faced obstacle after obstacle to a safe return. The LM wasn’t designed to hold three men for four days – only two men for two days – and the astronauts soon found that the carbon dioxide scrubbers couldn’t clean the air quickly enough. NASA engineers helped them jury-rig a square CM canister to fit in the LM filter’s round hole, preventing a fatal CO2 buildup. The astronauts also had to transfer guidance data to the LM and fire its engine to manually steer the spacecraft onto a trajectory that would use the Moon’s gravity to slingshot it home. They faced intense physical discomfort as well, persevering through freezing temperatures in the LM after the electrical equipment that provided heat had to be shut down to save power. And on top of everything else, Haise became increasingly ill with a bladder infection and fever as the journey went on.
Despite all the challenges, the crew safely splashed down on April 17, 1970. The extraordinary intelligence, perseverance, inventiveness, and teamwork that brought Apollo 13 home safely was seen as a triumph, and the mission became known as “a successful failure.”
