HOUSTON – Some of the most famous words in NASA’s history were spoken 56 years ago, and the moment still resonates today.
The NASA History Office marked the anniversary of the Apollo 13 accident, recalling one of the most harrowing near-disasters in American space exploration. Two days into the mission, a routine procedure set off a chain of events that would test the limits of human ingenuity and courage.
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Disaster strikes 210,000 miles from Earth
Apollo 13 had been on course to land in the Moon’s Fra Mauro region when a routine stirring of the spacecraft’s oxygen tanks triggered a catastrophic failure.
The crew reported hearing a loud bang. Within moments, they discovered oxygen tank 2 was completely empty, and tank 1’s pressure was falling fast.
“Houston, we’ve had a problem,” the crew reported, in words that would become permanently etched in the history of human spaceflight.
The crippled spacecraft was more than 210,000 miles (330,000 km) from Earth. With the crew’s lives on the line, the race to bring them home safely had begun.
Inside mission control
Inside the Mission Operations Control Room, at what is now NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, flight directors and engineers immediately went to work.
Eugene F. Kranz, identifiable by his signature white vest, was on duty as one of four Apollo 13 flight directors tasked with managing the unfolding crisis. A photograph taken during a television transmission just before the accident captures the atmosphere of the room in that pivotal moment.
Visible on the large screen in the control room was astronaut Fred W. Haise Jr., Apollo 13’s lunar module pilot, a glimpse of the crew just before their mission changed forever.
A crew, a crisis, a comeback
Apollo 13 carried Commander Jim Lovell, Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert, and Lunar Module Pilot Fred W. Haise Jr.
In the hours and days that followed the explosion, NASA engineers and the crew worked together in real time, using the lunar module as a lifeboat to conserve power, water and oxygen for the long journey back to Earth.
The crew splashed down safely on April 17, 1970, a testament to the skill, determination and teamwork of everyone involved.
NASA would later describe the mission as a “successful failure,” a catastrophe that, remarkably, never claimed a life.