Hollywood vs Reality: What Actually Happened During Apollo 13?

“Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a Main B Bus undervolt.” These words, spoken by astronaut Jim Lovell on April 13, 1970, signalled the start of one of NASA’s greatest crises. Apollo 13, the third American lunar landing mission, had suffered an onboard explosion, knocking out vital systems and placing the lives of the three astronauts aboard - Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert - in grave danger. Over the next four and a half days, thousands of engineers and technicians back on earth battled one crisis after another to keep the crippled spacecraft running and bring the astronauts safely back home. Their heroic efforts paid off when, on April 17, the Command Module Aquarius splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean and astronauts Lovell, Haise, and Swigert were brought aboard the aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima - safe and sound. The saga of Apollo 13 has been described as a “successful failure” and “NASA’s finest hour”, and was famously dramatized in the acclaimed 1995 film starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon. But while the film is praised for its historic and technical accuracy, it by necessity takes certain liberties for the sake of drama - for example, shortening Lovell’s rather passive real-life declaration to the far more urgent “Houston, we have a problem.” But what else did the film get right and wrong, and what actually caused the Apollo 13 disaster? Let’s find out as we take a deep dive into one of the greatest dramas in the history of manned spaceflight. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices