Apollo 13

Also called: Apollo XIII

In April 1970 America’s Apollo 13, on its way to the Moon, lost an oxygen tank in an explosion on its third night, gave up the landing, swung around the Moon using the lunar module as a lifeboat, and brought all three men home on 17 April.

Apollo 13 was to be the third crewed Moon landing. Commander Jim Lovell, command module pilot Jack Swigert and lunar module pilot Fred Haise left Kennedy Space Center on 11 April 1970. The command and service module was named Odyssey, the lunar module Aquarius; their target was the Fra Mauro highlands.

At 55 hours 54 minutes into the flight, nearly 330,000 km from Earth, oxygen tank No. 2 in the service module exploded — oxygen for breathing and for the fuel cells that made the ship’s power. The command module had to be shut down to save its re-entry batteries, and the three men moved into a lunar module built to keep two men alive for two days, and held out there for four. Mission Control in Houston planned a route around the Moon using the undamaged lander’s engine, and read up instructions for joining a carbon dioxide filter to the lander with plastic, cardboard and tape.

On 17 April the command module splashed down in the South Pacific. The review board found that during ground tests before launch the tank’s thermostatic switches had welded shut under the wrong voltage, damaging the insulation on its wiring. Apollo 13 never reached the Moon’s surface, but is remembered as a “successful failure”.