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Fifty years ago this weekend, Apollo 13 launched on its ill-fated mission to the moon.
It was to be the third mission to land American astronauts on the lunar surface, but, not long into the mission, the three-man crew of Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise faced a crisis. An oxygen tank explosion severely damaged their spacecraft some 200,000 miles from earth.
"I didn't know what happened at first,” Lovell tells Houston Matters senior producer Michael Hagerty.
Forever Misquoted
Lovell looked at his two crew mates and realized they had no idea either. That’s when Swigert uttered a phrase that would be forever misquoted and associated with Houston — for better or worse.
“Okay Houston we’ve had a problem here,” Swigert said over radio communication with Mission Control. When NASA asked them to repeat themselves, Lovell chimed in too.
“Uh, Houston we’ve had a problem,” he said.
That problem quickly took shape: the normal supply of electricity, water, and light on the vehicle's command module were lost. When he looked out the window, Lovell could see a gas escaping from the side of the spacecraft.
“It didn’t take much intelligence on my part to realize the gas escaping was oxygen,” he said. “So that clinched it.”
In an instant, the original mission to the moon was aborted while crews in Houston worked frantically around the clock to eventually bring the astronauts home safely.
Lovell was essentially NASA's most experienced astronaut at the time that he commanded that mission. He says the key to his crew’s success under duress was their mindset — staying calm and positive while addressing each challenge as it presented itself.
“If we’d been waiting for a miracle, well we’d still be up there waiting for that miracle to happen,” he said.
I Made Him Rich
The harrowing story was immortalized in the 1995 film Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks as Captain Lovell.
Many people, when they think about Lovell, might think of Tom Hanks. Lovell said he’s OK with that.
“I made him rich,” he said.
Lovell thought the film was pretty accurate, but, regarding that famous — and infamous in the Bayou City — line, “Houston, we have a problem,” Lovell said his only regret is not trademarking it.
A Successful Failure
While the mission didn’t achieve its original purpose, he still remembers it fondly.
“We said shortly after that flight that it was a successful failure,” Lovell said. “I think it will stand out as one of the episodes in the history of American spaceflight. And it will also stand out as a success to see how taking an almost insurmountable problem and then with the two sides — Mission Control working closely with the flight crew — turned a failure into a success.”
Lovell is a veteran of four space missions and received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At age 92, he lives in suburban Chicago.
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