The Crew : James A. Lovell

Apollo 13 was to be the third mission sent from the Apollo Project to land on the Moon. An explosion in one of the oxygen tanks caused the spacecraft to become crippled during the flight and the crew were forced to orbit the Moon and return to the Earth without landing. The Apollo 13 mission was launched on Saturday afternoon, April 11, 1970 from launch complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. The space prime crew consisted of trained experts Commander James A. Lovell Jr., Command module pilot Ken Mattingly and Lunar module pilot Fred W. Haise Jr. There was also three backup crew members named John W. Young, John L. Swigert Jr. and Charles M. Duke. This crew was ready to step in if for any reason something were to happen to any of the main

Apollo 13 launched on April 11, 1970 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crewmembers aboard the ship were James A. Lovell Jr., John L. Swigert Jr., and Fred W. Haise, Jr. Before the launch, there had been a few problems. Thomas K. Mattingly was supposed to fly on the Apollo 13 but he was exposed to the measles. He didn’t have the antibodies to fight the disease, causing him to not be able to go into space. Swigert took his place. Right before the launch, one of the technicians saw that the helium tank had a higher pressure than expected. Nothing was done to fix this. During liftoff, the second-stage engine shut down, causing the other engines to run longer than planned. Apollo 13 was off to a rocky start.

A few days later Lovell and his crew take off on the Apollo 13 mission. At first all is well until the second oxygen tank explodes, causing many problems for the crew; the most potent problem being that the crew was losing oxygen fast. Luckily, due to much ingenuity by the crew and mission control, the crew is able to arrive safely to earth without the deaths of any astronauts.

Several elements were considered harmful to both Aldrin and Armstrong; therefore the safety procedure was very in depth. “Apollo was kind of nested levels of risk”, Andrew Chaikin said, author of “A Man On The Moon (1994)”. Chaikin also elaborated on what procedure the astronauts had to undertake: “You get on top of a Saturn V Rocket with enough chemical energy to be the equivalent of a small atomic bomb. Then you throw away levels of safety by going into Earth’s orbit, then going to the moon, orbiting around the moon. And then, on the landing missions, two of the guys going down to the surface and being at an absolute dead stop on the moon”. Every component of the spacecraft were tested to the maximum, this helped NASA prevail over the Soviet Union’s N1 moon rocket which was never tested before it got launched. NASA engaged “what-if thinking” to make the onboard explosion of an oxygen tank on Apollo 13 survivable. For example, the docking mechanism that linked the command module and healthy lunar module was strong enough to allow the module to propel the combined spacecraft onto the proper course for home, Chaikan said. The astronauts lived in their lunar module “lifeboat” for several days before successfully transferring back to the command module and splashing down on

Shortly after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked successfully on the Moon for the first time in history, another lunar mission almost ended in disaster without the valor and strong leadership it took to get three men back to Earth. Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks), Jack Swiggert (played by Kevin Bacon), and Fred Haise (played by Bill Paxton) blasted off on the Apollo 13 mission on April 11, 1970, in trying to collect samples from the surface of the Moon and survey it. Swiggert took the place of the more experienced Ken Mattingly (played by Gary Sinese) since Mattingly was the only one not immune to the measles after one of the other astronauts had contracted it. The flight surgeon

Apollo 13 mission to the moon was suddenly derailed, when one of the three oxygen tanks exploded, and another failing simply as collateral damage from the explosion, therefore leaving one oxygen tank for the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13. The astronauts included mission commander Jim Lovell, lunar module pilot Fred Haise and command module pilot Jack Swigert (the back-up pilot for Ken Mattingly) found themselves rotating the moon in a small confined space that was designed for only two

The Apollo Program (1963-1972) was a series of missions with a goal to land humans on the moon. The program’s objective, set by President Kennedy in 1961, was achieved nine short years later (The Apollo Missions). Of the program, six were successful in doing so, Apollo 11 being the first to achieve that goal (Williams). The crew contained Neil Armstrong, Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin Jr. , and Michael Collins.

In 1961, the United States of America was embroiled in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This confrontation was taking place not only on land, sea and air, but in space as well. On May 25th, 1961 recently elected US President John F. Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress, during which he outlined his now famous Man on the Moon challenge. It was through this ambitious dream that the creation of the National Aeronautical Space Administration (NASA) came about, which President Kennedy challenged to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Although he didn't live to see the achievement of his dreams, the United States successfully landed Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969 and

The film Apollo 13 is a movie based on the events of Apollo 13. It starts out with Jim Lovell hosting a party for everyone in the neighbourhood to watch the Apollo 11 team land on the moon. At the party he tells his wife that he wants to walk on the moon himself. He was put on the Apollo 14 mission. As he is giving a tour of NASA he is told that the team for the Apollo 13 mission had fallen ill and him and his crew will be filling in. Later it is revealed that his crewmate (Ken Mattingly) got the measles and was taken off the mission and replaced by Jack Swigert. That team is in the rocket as it began to launch on April 11, 1970. It makes it up out of Earth's orbit and on trajectory to the moon with only one problem (a second stage engine cut

On April 13, 1970, NASA's Mission Control heard the five words that no control center ever wants to hear: "We've got a problem here." Jack Swigert, an astronaut aboard the Apollo 13 aircraft, reported the problem of broken down oxygen tanks to the Houston Control Center, less than two days after its takeoff on April 11th. Those at the Control Center in Houston were unsure what had happened to the spacecraft, but knew that some sort of explosion had occurred. This so-called explosion sent Apollo 13 spinning away from the Earth at 2,000 miles per hour, 75 percent of the way to the moon. In order to get the astronauts back to the

The Mercury Project was the next vast thing in scientific development and space travel in 1963. The Mercury Project “involved a series of six flights- two suborbital and four orbital”(Angelo 1).This project was the dream to put a human being into orbit, and to see if a human can withstand the acceleration, period of weightlessness, and high deceleration. The Mercury Atlas 9- the last craft to go on its mission with commander Gordon Cooper as the astronaut. Cooper became the first man astronaut to “sleep in space in orbit”. As he circled the Earth, “he also released a tiny minisatellite” that will stay in the orbit to complete data(Angelo 4). Atlas 9 was the last to orbit around the Earth which completed the Mercury Project! Cooper made it all the way to the 22nd orbit, which was the most in all the Atlas that went into the orbit. Suddenly during Cooper’s return to Earth, “the first significant malfunction of concern on the Mercury- Atlas 9 Mission occured”(Angelo 4). While Cooper was making final his orbit to return to Earth, the instruments malfunctioned on his spacecraft, which could have caused a total failure in his craft. Cooper had to use manual mode for his re-entry back to Earth, and was the first astronaut to successfully to do so. Coopers bravery will go down in history to this day. The Mercury Project of 1963 was a outstanding accomplishment for NASA, and was the start

Just 72 hours before the scheduled launch of Apollo 13, Ken Mattingly was removed from the mission and replaced by Jack Swiget from the back-up crew as command model pilot.

It was July 20th 1969. Jim Lovell, a NASA astronaut, watched on the television as Neil Armstrong took one large step. He decided that it was the night to share the big news he recently received. In the following year he was scheduled to walk on the Moon. Other than the switch from flying the Apollo 13 mission instead of 14 things were going smoothly all up until days before the launch. Mattingly, one of the men on the crew with Jim, got the measles. As a safety precaution Mattingly was switched with Jack Swigert. Lovell was upset, and insisted that they couldn’t break up the team of astronauts that had prepared together for so long, but his boss threatens to relieve him from his position on the mission. On April 11, 1970 they were finally ready

“Gemini helped NASA get ready for the Apollo moon landings. Ten crews flew missions on the two-man Gemini spacecraft. The Gemini missions were flown in 1965 and 1966. They flew between the Mercury and Apollo programs

Through NASA I learned that William B. Anders was born in Hong Kong, China in 1933. Later on he graduated from the naval academy in 1955 and got his pilot's wings in 1956. After he got his education he launched into all the work world. He worked numerous jobs including, being a fighter pilot in the Air defense command, was put in charge of technical management of nuclear power reactor shielding and radiation effects program. Then in 1964 William Anders switched gears over to more space exploration. Which lead him into many new opportunities. For example, he was the pilot on Apollo 8 which was the first manned flight that went into another body in the solar system. On that same mission he also captured the first ever picture of the "Earthrise".