Fifty years ago, on April 11, 1970, the Apollo 13 mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. Like Apollo 11 and Apollo 12, the goal of the mission was to land on the moon. However, astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise would face a nearly fatal issue with their capsule.
Just two days into the mission, the crew initiated a routine stirring of one of the oxygen tanks. Then an explosion occurred, causing a disruption to the life support systems. As a result, all three had to move into the Lunar Module, which was engineered to support only the two astronauts who were supposed to land on the moon. NASA then quickly improvised a system that would support all three crew members for four days—the time it would take to loop around the moon and get back home.
It was this incident that prompted the now famous line, “Houston, we have a problem.” Luckily, thanks to NASA’s ingenuity and the unflappability of the astronauts, all three made it safely back to Earth on April 17, 1970. This week, in honor of Apollo 13’s 50th anniversary, we travel alongside the crew and see the mission from their perspective.
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8:50 pm ET 04/24/20: A previous version of this article incorrectly named the astronauts who would have landed on the Moon's surface, as well as which module the crew used to splash down on Earth. Both facts have been corrected.