Apollo 13 patch logo
LUNAR ORBIT
"Houston, we’ve had a problem here," astronaut John Swigert radioed Mission Control.
Indeed Apollo 13 did have a problem. Two days after the April 11, 1970 liftoff the mission was 300,000 kilometers (about 200,000 miles) from home and hurtling towards the Moon. Suddenly there was a bang.
Astronaut James Lovell knew that one of the valves made that sort of noise, and he thought Fred Haise, Jr., the lunar module pilot, had turned it on without announcing it as a joke. "We didn’t really get concerned right away," he said, "but then I looked up at Fred, and Fred had that expression like it wasn’t his fault. We suddenly realized that something else had occurred."
In fact, a liquid oxygen tank had exploded, destroying the fuel cells that supplied electricity for the service module. While the command module had a back-up battery, it was needed for re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, and in any case, it only had a 10-hour life and they were 87 hours from home.
The crew’s salvation was in the lunar lander. For three days they relied on its limited power supply and oxygen. Then, instead of going into orbit around the Moon, the crew fired the lunar module’s descent engine to swing Apollo 13 around the Moon and head back to Earth.
The maneuver was successful, though the trip home was unpleasant as the temperature dropped and carbon dioxide built up.
On April 17 the crew moved into the command module and cut loose the dead service module. As it drifted off they could see the whole side had been blasted away. Finally, they made a successful re-entry, landing just six kilometers (3.5 miles) from their recovery ship in the Pacific Ocean.
Despite the near-disaster, the mission was not a complete failure. As planned, the crew managed to crash the third stage of their rocket on the Moon so the impact could be picked up by a seismometer (earthquake detector) placed on the Ocean of Storms by the Apollo 12 crew. The impact gave geophysicists additional information about the composition of the Moon. Also, though they couldn’t land, the crew did take pictures of the Moon during their swing around it.
All other Apollo flights were successful.