大象传媒

Kevin Fong explores the story of Apollo 13, told by the astronauts who flew it and the ground crew that saved it.

NASA has never known anything like it. An explosion hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth; a spacecraft leaking oxygen and losing power; a crew freezing in the darkness, at risk of suffocation. Will they survive long enough to get home? Will their damaged spacecraft even get them home?

This is the incredible story of the flight of Apollo 13, as told by the astronauts who flew it and the teams in Mission Control who saved it.

The launch on April 11th 1970 was NASA鈥檚 third bid to land people on the moon. It came just nine months after the triumph of Apollo 11, which saw Neil Armstrong鈥檚 famous small step win the space race, leaving the USA victorious over the Soviet Union.

Apollo 12 followed suit a few months later, executing its lunar landing with pinpoint accuracy. By the time of Apollo 13, NASA appeared to have found its rhythm. And yet to the public and the media, a feat that had appeared impossible less than a year earlier, now began to seem routine.

But Apollo 13 would turn out to be anything but routine. Flawed from the start, its fate was sealed by a faulty oxygen tank installed months earlier that would later explode, triggering a catastrophic series of events that threatened the spacecraft and the lives of the crew, over and over again.

At first the teams in mission control are puzzled by astronaut Jack Swigert鈥檚 seemingly innocent message: 鈥淗ouston, we鈥檝e had a problem鈥� and insist that what they鈥檙e seeing on their consoles in Houston must be an instrumentation failure. But then the truth emerges 鈥� the mission is over and now they鈥檙e in the fight of their lives to save the crew.

Kevin Fong relives the rescue with access to the mission audio archives.

Plus new interview material with surviving astronauts Jim Lovell and Fred Haise and a host of characters who worked round the clock to save Apollo 13 and NASA, from disaster.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

First broadcast on 大象传媒 Radio 4 in July 2020.

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