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The Apollo 13 mission, known for its near-disastrous events, was documented in the 1995 film starring Tom Hanks. Technical difficulties, including an oxygen tank explosion and engine shutdown, threatened the lives of the crew. The ground crew’s ingenuity and planning allowed for a safe return to Earth.
The Apollo 13 mission is perhaps best known today because of the highly popular and mostly accurate 1995 film Apollo 13. The film, starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon and Ed Harris, documents the story of the nearly disastrous mission attempt in the moon which surprisingly didn’t end with the deaths of astronauts, Jim Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Haise. Instead, the exceptional planning, intelligence, and quick thinking of the astronauts and ground crew quickly brought these brave gentlemen home after major malfunctions occurred on the Apollo spacecraft’s command module.
With Americans still so excited about the first moon landing, NASA quickly planned several more missions to land and explore the moon. Apollo 13 would have been the third mission to land on the moon were it not for extremely dangerous technical difficulties. One of them, the explosion of one of the two main oxygen tanks, is well known. This happened suddenly and without warning during a routine procedure called oxygen tank agitation, a standard process and test for keeping oxygen stable at higher levels of atmospheric pressure and lower temperatures.
The other Apollo 13 ship malfunction occurred minutes after liftoff. The center engine shut down two minutes before the end of a planned fuel burn, and the crew had to rely on several other engines to get the proper distance needed. This early technical difficulty was not a significant factor in the subsequent events of the oxygen tank explosion, but it helped NASA later develop a better plan for the engine design, as it could have had significant problems.
The bigger problem with the oxygen tank explosion, which helped power the command module, was the bigger concern. There was considerable fear that the Apollo 13 crew would run out of oxygen, relying on the Lunar Module (LM) portion of the spacecraft. The LM was only designed for two people, and one of the first problems encountered after the oxygen tank explosion was that the LM could not adequately filter carbon dioxide for three people. The exceptional ingenuity of the ground crew allowed the astronauts to create a better filter with the materials available on the ship.
Since the explosion of the oxygen tank had affected the spacecraft’s power, the second and main problem was how to get the astronauts home safely. The moon landing was scrapped, and the ground crew figured out a way for the ship to use the moon’s gravity through a single rotation around the moon to sling the ship toward the ground, in what’s called a return trajectory. free. The ground crew first had to train the astronauts on how to use the LM to correct the ship’s course under exceptionally difficult circumstances.
Through much thinking and planning, and many moments of anxiety, the course correction and free return trajectory worked as intended. The Apollo 13 astronauts returned safely to earth, with no injuries save for a bladder infection contracted by Fred Haise. The mission, undertaken on 11 April, concluded, if not successfully, with the lives of the crew still intact on 17 April. The oxygen tank explosion occurred two days into the mission, causing extraordinary anxiety for both astronauts and ground crew as they attempted to find a way home.
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