A Triumph of Human Ingenuity

With human spaceflight occurring with such regularity and reliability, it’s worth remembering the human sacrifice and staggering resilience that got us to this point. One of the greatest examples is the near-tragedy of Apollo 13, the manned lunar mission that almost didn’t make it back.

Ron Howard’s ‘Apollo 13’ faithfully depicts the events of that historic mission in what is perhaps the most accurate space film ever produced, with most of the dialogue coming from the actual transcripts between the astronauts and mission control as flight director Gene Kranz and his team do the impossible to bring Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise back from disaster.

Apollo 13 (1995) - IMDb

Directed by Ron Howard. With Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise. NASA must devise a strategy to return Apollo 13 to Earth safely after the spacecraft undergoes massive internal damage putting the lives of the three astronauts on board in jeopardy.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112384/

Listen to Commander Jim Lovell recount the story in this interview:

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50 years later: Jim Lovell recounts the Apollo 13 disaster

Lovell: Yeah. First of all, we were getting all squared away to check things out. During the countdown demonstration test, which was two weeks before the flight, we had the spacecraft loaded with fuel and things of this nature. The test was completed - everything worked fine for launching the vehicle.