Apollo 13 turns 50

Fred Haise, now 86, said he will mark “boom day” on Monday, the day when an oxygen tank burst on the spacecraft carrying him and fellow astronauts Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert. Saturday is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13, a planned moon voyage that turned into a 200,000-mile rescue mission for the astronauts aboard the damaged craft. Mission Cmdr. Lovell, 92, said he considers himself lucky to have survived the trip and to have reached its golden anniversary. Swigert died in 1982.

How did they survive the mission? After Lovell famously radioed Mission Control in Texas, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” on April 13, 1970, NASA raced against diminishing oxygen and power supplies on the spaceship to chart a path home for the astronauts. Their teamwork and ingenuity are remembered as Mission Control’s finest hour. The 1995 movie Apollo 13, starring Ed Harris and Tom Hanks, memorialized the mission, which inspired a moment of American pride and patriotism as the tumultuous 1970s began.

Dig deeper: Read Jamie Dean’s feature on Charlie Duke, a backup astronaut for Apollo 13 who contracted the measles and exposed the primary crew. As a result, NASA brought in Swigert to replace original crew member Ken Mattingly, who had never had the disease.