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NASA Marks 50 Years Since Apollo 13 Mission

Associated Press

   CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA - Apollo 13's astronauts never gave a thought
   to their mission number as they blasted off for the moon 50 years ago.
   Even when their oxygen tank ruptured two days later -- on April 13.

   Jim Lovell and Fred Haise insist they're not superstitious. They even
   use 13 in their email addresses.

   As mission commander Lovell sees it, he's incredibly lucky. Not only
   did he survive NASA's most harrowing moonshot, he's around to mark its
   golden anniversary.

   "I'm still alive. As long as I can keep breathing, I'm good," Lovell,
   92, said in an interview with The Associated Press from his Lake
   Forest, Illinois, home.

   A half-century later, Apollo 13 is still considered Mission Control's
   finest hour.

   Lovell calls it "a miraculous recovery."

   Haise, like so many others, regards it as NASA's most successful
   failure.

   "It was a great mission," Haise, 86, said. It showed "what can be done
   if people use their minds and a little ingenuity."

   As the lunar module pilot, Haise would have become the sixth man to
   walk on the moon, following Lovell onto the dusty gray surface. The
   oxygen tank explosion robbed them of the moon landing, which would have
   been NASA's third, nine months after Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and
   Buzz Aldrin took humanity's first footsteps on the moon.

   Now the coronavirus pandemic has robbed them of their anniversary
   celebrations. Festivities are on hold, including at Kennedy Space
   Center in Florida, where the mission began on April 11, 1970, a
   Saturday just like this year.

   That won't stop Haise, who still lives in Houston, from marking what he
   calls "boom day" next Monday, as he does every April 13.

   Lovell, Haise and Jack Swigert, a last-minute fill-in who died in 1982,
   were almost to the moon when they heard a bang and felt a shudder. One
   of two oxygen tanks had burst in the spacecraft's service module.

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