Apollo 13: How Three Men Survived a Dying Spacecraft

You're 180,000 miles from Earth when a shuddering bang rips through your spacecraft, the power starts dying, and you watch your oxygen vent silently into the void. There is no pulling over. This is the real-time fight for survival that became NASA's finest hour.Using NASA's declassified mission logs, crew accounts, and engineering teardowns, this episode reconstructs how Apollo 13 turned from humanity's third moon landing into a desperate rescue in April 1970. It's a master class in crisis management, human endurance, and the kind of improvisation no manual could have prepared anyone for, plus the chilling chain of tiny errors that nearly killed three astronauts.How a last-minute crew swap put Jack Swigert aboard just 38 hours before launch after Ken Mattingly was exposed to German measlesThe cause of the explosion traced to a 2-inch factory drop and a voltage spec change that welded a thermostat shut and baked the oxygen tank's wiringThe 'mailbox' hack engineers built from manual covers, plastic bags, a spacesuit hose, and duct tape to fix the deadly square-peg, round-hole CO2 problemWhy venting oxygen created false stars, forcing the crew to align the spacecraft using the sun for the PC plus 2 slingshot burnThe freezing 38-degree cabin, 6.8 ounces of water a day, and the untested cold-start reentry procedure invented on the fly by John Aaron and Ken Mattingly