NASA Team Tells Story of Apollo 13 Unfinished Mission

From left, Gene Kranz, Fred Haise and James Lovell of the Apollo 13 team.

Hundreds of students and fans of the space program listened at Bud Walton Arena.

Gene Kranz describes complications that had to be resolved to bring the Apollo 13 crew home.

James Lovell was the commander of Apollo 13, aborted after an oxygen tank exploded.

The Apollo 13 team with students and staff.

Photos by Logan Webster

The Apollo 13 team is greeted by Daniel McFarland, right, president of ASG.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – James Lovell and Fred Haise, the two surviving members of the three-man Apollo 13 team, and lead flight director Gene Kranz spoke Thursday evening about the aborted mission to the moon as part of the 2015 Distinguished Lecture Series.

A crowd of several thousand listened at Bud Walton Arena to the story of survival against odds when the Apollo 13 crew had to abort a mission to land on the moon. Lovell, Haise and Jack Swigert were more than two days into their space flight, the third mission intended to land humans on the surface of the moon.

Just before hour 56 an oxygen tank aboard the service module exploded, blowing a section of the exterior off the module. A second tank also began leaking its oxygen into space unbenownst to the crew. They were 205,000 miles from earth.

Haise told a press conference earlier in the day that his initial and primary reaction was not fear. That's the question he was asked most often. "Adult audiences would ask 'Did you think you would make it back?'" Haise said. "But kids would ask it straightforwardly, 'Did you think you would die?'" Instead of fear at the perilous situation, Haise said, that what he felt was a sense of nausea at the recognition that they would not be landing on the moon. Whatever else happened, the loss of the oxygen tank meant that they would have to forgo a lunar landing.

The next thought throughout NASA was how do we get back. The space craft consisted of three modules: the now-crippled service module, the command module and the lunar module, a two-piece structure intended to get two astronauts to the lunar surface and back.

Lovell said, "We were all test pilots before we became astronauts, so we were all very familiar with solving problems."

Kranz, who was back on earth guiding the mission, said, "For the first several minutes after a crisis, you try to avoid doing something dumb."

To help prevent a dumb decision, the astronauts logged hundreds of hours in simulators prior to the real mission, while all manner of contrived "accidents" were thrown at them by trainers, a "rather devious group," as Lovell put it. The training paid off. Between Lovell, Haise, Swigert, Franz and the rest of the command control in Houston, NASA figured out how to get the team back to earth, using oxygen from the lunar module, conserving power throughout the craft, and continuing their flight path to the moon to use its gravitation pull to sling the modules back toward earth.

Twenty-five years later, in 1995, the movie Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise and Ed Harris, was released to a new generation. Now on the 45th anniversary of the moonshot – a failure in its stated objective but triumphant in its test of human ingenuity and teamwork – the team still receives accolades for everything that it did right.