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50 Years Ago, Apollo 13 Moon Mission Became NASA's 'Successful Failure'

Kane Farabaugh

   CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - By the time the towering Saturn V rocket carrying
   the Apollo 13 crew left the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Florida,
   thundering into the skies on April 11, 1970, traveling to the moon
   seemed about as interesting to the general public as commuting to work.

   It was, after all, America's third mission aimed at landing on the
   desolate orb, a feat accomplished nine months before during the
   much-celebrated Apollo 11 mission.

   "After the landing there was a general letdown, not just by the general
   public, but I think by NASA itself," Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell
   explained to VOA during a 2015 interview at the Adler Planetarium in
   Chicago. "Enthusiasm for lunar flights had diminished greatly. ... By
   the time Apollo 13 came around, I think the only mention in The New
   York Times was on page 67 of the weather page, because everyone had
   forgotten."

   Lovell added, "Very few people in the news media had manned the news
   desk at Johnson Space Center."

   The public's lack of attention all changed in an instant, when an
   explosion rocked their spacecraft hurtling through space two days into
   the mission. Lovell and crewmates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were in
   grave peril.

   "It had been a major sound, a metallic echoing, a bang that came
   through the spacecraft," Haise recalled. "We knew it was nothing
   normal, something bad."

   As warning signals lit up the cabin of their command module -- and
   instrument panels at NASA's mission control in Houston, Texas -- Lovell
   uttered a sentence that would reverberate through history.

   "Houston, we've had a problem."

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