Page 39 - Command Module News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Apollo 13 launched at 13:13 military time. it was set to enter in lunar orbit the 13th of april. but the crew were having nothing but good luck. 56 hours into the flight, the crew finished a broadcast showing how comfortably they lived and worked in weightlessness. >> the crew of 13 wishing everyone a nice evening. >> nine minutes later, oxygen tank number two blew up causing the number one tank to also fail. >> houston, we've had a problem. >> houston, we had a problem, words that would be forever linked to commander jim lovell. >> when the explosion occurred, i thought to myself, why me? why...

>> july 16th, 1969, showtime. >> you think about the countdown as the curtain opening, worry, the clouds, clear thinking, it's absolutely needed should something goes wrong. >> the launch, another dazzling pillar of fire was lost. the three-day, 240,000-mile trip from the earth to the moon without incident. >> we have a happy home. there's plenty of room for the three of us. >> then, four days into the mission came time to do what no astronaut had done before, decouple the lunar module from the command module and guide it safely to the moon. on their way down, armstrong and aldrin realize they...

Instructing the crew to build a makeshift rig they called the mailbox, to purge the deadly gas from the craft and keep oxygen levels safe. this bought some time for the crew, who were barely breathing and running low on water. you lost 14 pounds? >> i didn't realize i'd lost 14 pounds. and i guess, you know, i was all charged up. >> they were sick, freezing, and tired, but safe for now. mission control's next task was to get the broken-down craft out of a lunar landing course and back on a free return to an earth trajectory. engineers in houston figured the crew could do this by executing two ...

They were 200,000 miles from earth. and going in the wrong direction. did you ever actually think, "i might die"? >> well, we thought our chances were about 10%. >> did you really? >> oh, yeah, when we realized after we saw the oxygen escaping that things could be, you know, really bad. >> we have broken out into space. >> as the world watched, ground control in houston faced a formidable task. think of a way for the crew to fix their spaceship, test it, and then write up step-by-step procedures for the astronauts to follow just to get home. >> we immediately went to the simulators to try to d...

Instructing the crew to build a makeshift rig they called the mailbox, to purge the deadly gas from the craft and keep oxygen levels safe. this bought some time for the crew, who were barely breathing and running low on water. you lost 14 pounds? >> i didn't realize i'd lost 14 pounds. and i guess, you know, i was all charged up. >> they were sick, freezing, and tired, but safe for now. mission control's next task was to get the broken-down craft out of a lunar landing course and back on a free return to an earth trajectory. engineers in houston figured the crew could do this by executing two ...