Apollo 13: 1. Time bomb

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Friday, April 17th, 1970.

This is the closing act of the mission of Apollo 13, NASA's aborted expedition to the moon.

Four days ago, their spacecraft was crippled by an explosion.

Since then, mission control has battled round the clock just to keep the crew alive.

Across the globe, millions of radios and television sets are tuned in to witness the astronauts' fate.

The world is watching, waiting.

We're now coming to the moment, the last moments of Apollo 13, as it comes in, as it begins its re-entry.

The best thing we can do now is just to listen and hope.

The last few seconds down to re-entry.

At this point, there's very little anybody can do, including the astronauts, except wait.

as they come in through the uppermost fringes of the Earth's atmosphere.

You're coming back from the moon at 35,000 feet per second.

That is hauling the mail.

And you got to do it just right.

Computers put them on course.

All anybody can do now is cross their fingers.

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.

This is the final moment of truth.

Everything now hangs on the capsule's heat shield and the hope that it can protect them from the fire of re-entry.

Apollo Control Houston, we've just had loss of signal from Honeysuckle.

And they've lost them on the main radio contact antenna in Australia at Honeysuckle Creek.

Sleep deprived and at the end of their tether, astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Hayes and Jack Swigert are caged inside their capsule, hurtling through the scorching atmosphere, watching the flicker of Inferno through their windows.

The fierce heat of re-entry charges the air around them, creating a wall through which radio signals cannot pass.

Just about now, they should be going through the moment of maximum heat.

And we'll only know whether or not that heat shield was damaged by the explosion three days ago.

And they come out of radio blackout in just over two minutes.

It's a miracle they've made it even this far.

And still, nobody knows if they'll survive.

Everyone holds their breath.

None more so than the astronauts' families.

Everyone was there to watch the landing with me, and I was surrounded by my children.

And

it was so quiet.

It was so tense.

Very tense.

Less than 10 seconds now, we will attempt to contact Apollo 13 through one of the Oriah aircraft.

Continuing to monitor this Apollo-controlled Houston.

Okay, Jibby.

Tibby coming out of blackout now.

Messager?

Can you see him?

Messager.

Negative.

There is no contact, no sign of the crew or their capsule.

And in mission control, only anxiety.

That never happened to us before.

That the blackout didn't end when it was supposed to.

That was when we came to this period where you could have heard a pin drop.

Network, any reports of our eye acquisition yet?

Not at the soundside.

Okay.

No answer.

Did it burn up?

Are we okay?

We did everything we could, I think.

What could we have missed?

There wasn't anything we could do about it.

Zip.

Zero.

Networking RIA contact yet?

Senator Staff site.

Okay.

From the BBC World Service, this is 13 Minutes to the Moon, Season 2.

I'm Kevin Fong, and this is the incredible story of the flight of Apollo 13.

Let's make sure we don't blow the whole mission.

There's one whole side of that spacecraft missing

that's the end right there

episode one

time bomb

this is apollo saturn launch control we're just passing the one hour mark in our countdown now in the final hour of the countdown toward the launch of apollo 13

the closeout apollo 13 was nasa's third bid to land people on the moon it came just nine months after the triumph of apollo 11 which saw Neil Armstrong's famous small step win the space race, leaving the United States victorious over the Soviet Union.

Apollo twelve followed suit, executing its lunar landing with pinpoint accuracy.

So by the time of Apollo thirteen, NASA appeared to have found its rhythm.

And to the public, a feat that had appeared impossible less than a year earlier now began to seem routine.

But Apollo thirteen was fatally flawed from the start.

It would never land on the moon.

Instead, an explosion triggered a catastrophic cascade of events that threatened the spacecraft and the lives of the crew over and over again throughout their mission.

For this season, I've talked to the two astronauts of Apollo 13 who are alive today and a cast of characters who supported them from the ground to understand not just what happened, but how it happened.

This is James Lovell, commander of Apollo 13.

You have to look at this flight.

It's a tale of two groups.

One group in a comfortable control room fortified by hot coffee and cigarettes that had to make quick and correct decisions.

The other group in a cold, damp, crippled spacecraft 200,000 miles from Earth who had to make sure that what they said was number one, gonna work, and number two, are we gonna put it in correctly and control the spacecraft to do the job?

Jim Lovell was selected as an astronaut in 1962 against fierce competition.

He'd flown fighter jets for the US Navy, mastering the precarious art of landing on an aircraft carrier at night in rolling seas.

And as if that were not hazard enough, he later became a Navy test pilot, taking new and experimental vehicles into the air.

But at heart, he was an explorer, and for him, there could be no greater prize than the chance to walk on the moon.

This was what I thought I was born to do.

I mean, exploration.

This is a new territory.

We understood the risk,

but this was where you trade off risk for reward.

This certainly was, at least to me, the reason why I was at NASA in the first place.

To Jim Lovell, the spacecraft were ships sailing on a new ocean.

And when the time came to name his Apollo 13 command module, he chose something to reflect his ambitions.

Odyssey.

I thought that Odyssey

was very appropriate.

A long voyage.

with many chances of misfortune.

And in keeping with the spirit of exploration, the mission had a motto.

Ex-luna scientia.

How more appropriate could you put on a patch a motto, going to the moon looking for an adventure than Ex Luna Scientia, looking at the moon for science?

Apollo 13 was the first of the lunar missions for which science was the true focus.

Headed for a heavily cratered area called Frau Moro, it was an opportunity for real geological study that would help unravel the mystery of the Moon's origins.

Amongst the astronauts, Lovell was already a seasoned veteran.

This would be his fourth mission in space, but it would also be his only opportunity to set foot on the surface of the Moon.

He'd decided that Apollo 13 would be his last spaceflight.

Lovell was already well regarded amongst his peers.

He'd flown twice in Earth orbit aboard the earlier Gemini missions.

But it was his pioneering role as pilot in the crew of Apollo 8, the first mission to escape the Earth's clutches and orbit the moon, that earned everyone's deep respect.

That crew on Apollo 8 were brave, I'll tell you.

Here's astronaut Charlie Duke, a member of Apollo 13's backup crew.

That was a big deal flying Apollo 8 to the moon.

First time they'd ever been, anybody had ever been on a Saturn.

And once they left Earth orbit, they were on their own.

Everything had to work.

And it was a second flight on the Apollo command module.

So it was gutsy.

Was Jim Lovell the ideal person to be in command of the mission Apollo 13?

Turned out I believe he was, because he was real laid-back and real cool.

He wasn't really, didn't get nervous.

He had a nickname Shaky, but I don't remember why that was, because he wasn't that way in training.

Preparations for launch were well underway.

Jim Lovell's prime crew was completed by two rookie astronauts, Command Module pilot Ken Mattingly and lunar module pilot Fred Hayes.

Neither had yet flown in space, but Hayes was more than eager to go.

It's one of these things that bills, as you're getting closer and closer, and you're looking at the booster at night, lit up, you're doing some of the late bench checks of things that you know it's for real.

Now, I'd gone through this twice before as a backup.

And mentally, what you do as a backup, you train equally to the prime, all the same work.

You're ready to go.

You kind of back away from being that excited because you realize within a month, you're probably not going to get to go fly.

But in the case of one of Apollo 13, it was the first time it was, I hoped, at least my opportunity to really go fly.

So it was a beating of the drums kind of buildup.

Hayes and his fellow astronauts were amongst the most highly skilled, highly trained people anywhere in the world.

But spaceflight is a complex endeavor, and much of the mission was beyond their control.

Their safety and security was woven into the fabric of their technology and vehicles.

The Apollo spacecraft represented the state of the art in science and engineering and the distillation of the labor of 400,000 individuals.

So much of it was mission critical, so much of it had to work perfectly.

But within Apollo 13 lay a hidden flaw.

18 months earlier, before the mission had even been decided upon, technicians had fumbled one of the oxygen tanks on the spacecraft's assembly line.

It fell from a height of just two inches, but that was enough.

The tanks were spherical shells made of titanium about the diameter of a bicycle wheel.

They were built to hold liquid oxygen at super cold temperatures.

Inside there were fans and heaters to stir the liquid oxygen and keep it at the right pressure.

But the damage caused by the drop was like a single falling domino, leading to a cascade of further complications.

During testing on the ground, while attempting to to fill and empty the tank, there were problems.

The engineers ran the heaters within for far too long, and the elements inside were allowed to become way too hot.

And because of this, the Teflon insulation surrounding wires connected to the fans melted.

But none of this was detected, and the damaged tank was installed in the Apollo 13 spacecraft.

The stage was now set.

Bare wires, waiting to to spark, lay buried in the heart of Odyssey's oxygen supply.

To ignite catastrophe, it would take just the flick of a single switch.

This wasn't a mission for the superstitious.

This was Apollo 13 due to launch at 13 minutes past one in the afternoon, or on a 24-hour clock, 1313.

And the crew were scheduled to begin their approach to the moon on April the 13th.

Superstition aside, in the days before launch, Jim Lovell recalls that his crew suffered a run of bad luck, starting with health problems affecting both the prime and backup crews.

Well, it was one of a series of things I heard on that occurred on Apollo 13.

Many people think it's a a sort of a bad number to be involved with, and I kind of think they're right.

Anyway,

the backup crew member, Charlie Duke, was exposed to the measles.

In fact, I think he got the measles.

And anyway, the prime crew member, including all three of us, plus the other backup people, were exposed to the measles.

And illness amongst astronauts that threatened the latest lunar mission just a week before launch was a story for CBS Television News.

Dr.

Charles Berry, Director of Medical Operations, said today all three Apollo 13 astronauts were exposed yesterday to German measles.

Berry said the crew, James Lovell, Thomas Mattingly, and Fred Hayes, are now in good physical condition, but the results of tests for German measles will not be known until Wednesday.

Those results could postpone the launching scheduled for San Francisco.

It was an uneasy few days for Fred Hayes.

So they were taking blood from us pretty much every day, I think,

and shipping him off to

some expert looking at our blood for the antibodies and whatever.

And of course,

that added a lot of tension that week that normally there wouldn't have been.

CBS picked up the story again.

Blood tests indicate two members of the Prime crew, Lovell and Hayes, have adequate immunity.

But Ken Mattingly seems to have no resistance to the disease at all.

The only way doctors could guarantee that he will not get sick during the flight would be if he got sick before and recovered.

On the recommendation of its medical team, NASA decided that Ken Mattingly wouldn't fly.

It was a difficult decision to make.

Nobody could be sure if Mattingly would fall ill.

But German measles is a serious disease, bad enough to hospitalize or kill a patient, and certainly bad enough to stop an astronaut being an effective crew member.

It was the right decision, but it was a blow to the crew's morale.

And of course, just the huge, enormous disappointment roughly two and a half days before launch when the decision was made to change out one crewman, Jack Schweiger, would replace Ken Manningly,

which obviously was extremely emotional with Ken because he had done that build-up getting ready to go and now had it yanked away.

So emotionally it was quite a blow, but operationally you weren't worried about that substitution?

No, no, I always felt as a backup I could fly it just as good, if not better, than the person who flew.

We did go through some training rather late approaching launch, and as it turned out with this crew change out, we were in simulators into the evening before launch the next morning.

Jim Lovell reluctantly accepted the replacement of Ken Mattingly but he was more than happy that his backup Jack Swigert was up to the job.

Jack was fine because he had done a lot of the work in the malfunction procedures and so in reality he was a perfect guy to change out.

But that was sort of a bad omen.

There were several bad omens in that flight.

Some teams come together at the last moment.

Some are made for life.

And few can be said to be stronger than the partnership between Jim and his wife, Marilyn.

How did you and Jim meet in the first place?

We met in high school.

That was back in the early 40s.

He was a junior and I was a

freshman.

He was two years ahead of me.

And

believe it or not, he was working in the cafeteria.

And

I guess we started talking as I went through the line.

And before I know it, I was working in the cafeteria myself.

And

we started dating.

Oh, I know.

He took me to his junior prom.

And we've been together ever since.

By the time of Apollo 13, Marilyn and Jim had four children, and they'd been living in the suburbs of Houston since the early days of the space program.

And I wondered if his astronaut adventures had just become part of normal family life.

It was never routine.

He had been on three flights, and I wasn't really looking forward to it because he was so busy down at the Cape, and he wasn't home very much for the family.

I think I was apprehensive.

But leading up to this flight, were you more apprehensive than usual?

Yes, I would say so.

One of the reasons, I'm superstitious, I think.

Apollo 13 just didn't agree with me.

We're now approaching the T-1 minute mark, T-minus one minute and counting.

Friday, April 11th, 1970, the morning of launch.

Jim Lovell and his crew were now strapped into their command module, perched on top of the towering Saturn V rocket, the most powerful launcher in the history of spaceflight.

Marilyn put her misgivings aside and took her young family to Cape Kennedy in Florida to watch Jim blast off on his Odyssey to the moon.

The launches never failed to impress.

Oh, it was a wonderful experience.

NASA allowed my children and myself to go out to a mound of sand about three miles from the launch pad itself.

And

it was a perfect place.

I think they said we were closest as anyone could be.

And the earth just shook.

One,

Lero, we have commit and we have liftoff at 2.13.

The Saturn V building up to 7.6 million pounds of thrust and it has cleared the tower.

Jay, the Lovell's eldest son, was awestruck by the experience.

Do you ever hear a Saturn V take off?

That's amazing.

Amazing.

I mean, you say it light up.

You see the smoke.

But they don't tell you about the crackling noise that comes three seconds later and the ground shakes.

My

Then the heat wave.

You know, that's a Saturn V with seven million pounds of thrust.

13 use and go at 30 seconds.

That, that is amazing.

Roll completely and we're pitching.

Roger that, stand by for mode 1 fravo.

His seat shuddering with the force of the launch, Fred Hayes is enjoying his first taste of spaceflight.

It was a very herky-jerky ride, I'll say, compared to anything I experienced in airplanes.

That was probably the biggest difference.

Those big engines gave you a lot of jerking around,

which was, I'm sure, exaggerated because you're way, way up on the tippy top of this large rocket.

13 Houston, go at one.

We show the cabin and relieving.

13, right here.

Well, it was old hat for me.

I mean, relatively speaking, I know what to expect.

The things worked perfectly.

The booster, the Saturn V, did its job.

Everything was really fine.

Over the airways, the voice of NASA's public announcer, carried by television and radio broadcast, keeps track of the launch.

And at one minute 10 seconds, we show an altitude of 4.1 nautical miles.

Downrange, one mile.

13 Houston, standby for Mode 1 Charlie.

Mark, you're one Charlie.

Mark, one, Charlie.

The first stage of the rocket is nearly spent.

Hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel have been burned, and it is now no more than a dead weight to be discarded.

And 13, you're go for staging.

Go for staging, or where EDS manual.

Altitude now 17 miles coming up on staging.

But then, malfunction.

One of the engines unexpectedly shuts down two minutes early, threatening the launch and leading to this exchange between the flight controllers monitoring the launch in mission control.

Flight boosted in board out was way early.

Okay.

Flight confirmed uh number five engine down.

Right.

There's another sign of is Apollo 13 a bad number.

Of course, at first we saw the the problem, the light came on and we called and said, you know, we've lost an engine and they agreed to it.

Houston, what's the story on engine five?

Jim Houston, we don't have a story on why the inboard out was uh early, but the uh other engines are go and you're go.

All right,

So that worked out.

But, you know,

another anomaly, which,

you know, we thought we got over that.

I mean, in fact, I looked at the guys, I said, you know what, in every flight, there's something goes wrong.

This time, this engine went out.

But by gosh, we had enough fuel to get in Earth orbit and we can go all the way to the moon.

So, hey, let's sit back and relax and enjoy this.

Two hours and 40 minutes after the launch, the crew are safely in orbit around the Earth and preparing to fire their engine once more, this time to send the spacecraft on its way to the moon.

Here, you can just about hear Jim Lovell confirm the moment of ignition.

Jim Lovell reports we have ignition.

The engine springs to life again,

accelerating Apollo 13 to 25,000 miles per hour, breaking the bond with Earth.

After five minutes, it shuts down, right on schedule.

And now for a little anatomy lesson.

To get to the Moon, the Saturn V had to lift two vehicles into space: the Command and Service Module, or CSM, and the Lunar Module, better known as the LEM.

The Lunar Module, named Aquarius, was only designed to be flown by two astronauts and only for a short trip from lunar orbit down to the surface.

It was built to be light, with little in the way of creature comforts.

It had no seats and was cramped and fragile.

The command and service module was itself divided into two separate compartments, the conical command module in which the crew lived and the cylindrical service module which held the engine, supplies of fuel, oxygen and the means of generating electrical power.

In comparison to the spider-like lunar module, the command module Odyssey was built like a tank.

Robust and powerful, sturdy enough to endure the violence of re-entry, the command module was the vehicle from which the crew controlled the mission.

They depended on it for shelter as they crossed the quarter of a million miles of space between the Earth and the Moon.

On the voyage to the Moon, the Command and Lunar Module would dock to one another, nose to nose, and the crew could float back and forth between the two.

Apollo 13 is safely set to coast for three days and for the first time there's a chance to sit back, enjoy the ride and take some photographs of home.

Go ahead man.

Fred Hayes is on the radio to fellow astronaut Vance Brand, the capsule communicator or Capcom for this shift.

The Capcom is a key position in mission control.

Under normal circumstances, they're the only person allowed to talk to the crew during the mission.

Okay, Earth should be coming into view.

Earth's starting to look pretty small now.

Well, uh, looking at a new vance, uh,

it's hard to be convinced it's even the Earth now that these uh water and clouds.

Hey, you still there, man?

Raj, go ahead.

I guess the world really does

turn.

I can see some of my land masses now.

It must be Australia down near the bottom and

part of Asia, China probably.

Hey, maybe the fact that you verified that the Earth really turns, we can call this Hayes' theory, huh?

Very good, Vance.

Very good.

Uh Vance, uh, from our calculations only taking about ten Earth weather photography pictures.

I was thinking about uh

getting squid away to bed down for the evening pretty soon.

Okay,

the The crew even has time to queue up some in-flight entertainment.

Good lord.

Two uneventful days pass.

In the mission control room, four separate teams of flight controllers have worked round the clock, checking that everything on the spacecraft is working and that the mission is on course.

There have been a few glitches, but nothing serious.

One of the controllers now on duty is Cy Liebergot.

In mission control, his call sign is Ecom.

He's in charge of monitoring the command and service module's electrical power and its life support systems.

Apollo 13's oxygen tanks are his responsibility.

Cy Liebergot is sitting at his console.

He monitors the numbers flickering away on his screen, tracking the information from a network of sensors on board the spacecraft.

Everything looks fine.

I was during the last hour of my eight-hour shift.

We had three shifts a day, each eight hours long,

and

it was very routine.

I mean, after all, this is the third time we're going to go land on the moon.

With Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert keeping watch in Odyssey, Apollo 13 is now nearly 200,000 miles from Earth.

Fred Hayes and Jim Lovell, video camera in hand, begin something that had become a tradition on lunar missions.

A live TV broadcast with Capcom Jack Lausmer joining in over the radio from the ground.

Roger Houston,

all we plan to do for you today is turn out in the

spaceship

Odyssey

and take you on through from Odyssey into the tunnel into Aquarius.

Enjoy a little bit of

the landing vehicle.

And

your turn.

Hayes and I were in the lunar module, and we were doing a routine

broadcast down to the control center, which was automatically putting it out to the network.

And we were doing what people had done before and done after.

We were discussing the switches, and we were looking outside and showing them what the Earth looked like out that far and all that.

Immediately adjacent to the engine cover here, I I have my hand on a white box now.

This happens to be James backpack, which will

supply oxygen and water for cooling while on the lunar surface.

It's a great performance.

But no TV networks are carrying the show.

And neither are there any reporters watching in Mission Control's viewing room.

Just the crewswives and their children.

There was nobody there from the news media because, after all, we is old hat now

in their minds.

And there was nobody from the news media there.

And Jim Lovell, the commander, didn't know that.

He thought it was going to be a normal thing when they give their

little tour of the lunar module, but he didn't realize that they had lost interest.

We might give you a quick shot of our entertainment on board the spacecraft, which has been keeping this company for some time.

In 1970, the state-of-the-art in entertainment systems was a humble tape recorder.

This little tape recorder has been

a big benefit to us in

passing through the type away and our transit out to the bone.

Okay, Jim,

it's been a real good TV show.

We think we ought to conclude it from here now.

What do you think?

Roger sounds good, Ed.

This is the crew of Apollo 13.

Wish everybody there.

I see evening, and we're just about ready to close out our inspection of Aquarius and get back for a pleasant evening at Odyssey.

Good night.

Thank you, 13.

In mission control, sitting next to the Capcom, is Gene Krantz, the flight director for this shift.

He leads the mission control team, gathering and filtering information from his flight controllers, using that to make critical decisions.

If you heard the first season of 13 Minutes to the Moon, you'll know him well as the no-nonsense chain-smoking former Marine and lead flight director for the historic landing of Apollo 11.

Everyone is relaxed.

The mission is well on track and going to plan.

But all of that is about to change.

After the television broadcast was concluded, the Wisen families had been behind me in the viewing room, and as they left, we

sort of waved adios and they went off.

They turned the lights out in the viewing room behind me.

And the final thing we had to do was to get the crew to sleep.

Gene Kranz, in his interview with the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.

And we have a pre-sleep checklist we go through.

It's about five pages in length.

And we're down to the final item in the checklist.

We're getting ready to close it out.

Now, earlier in the shift, we had had an

anomaly associated with a tank pressure.

At this point, the glitch isn't a major concern, but it's something that E-com Sai Liebergot wants to troubleshoot before the end of his shift.

We had lost a

quantity sensor on oxygen tank, quarter tank oxygen tank number two,

early in the mission, about 47 hours into the mission.

And it's no big deal.

And then being a good engineer, I decided, you know,

I don't want to wait until the morning.

Why don't I just go see if the oxygen tanks are behaving properly and before they go to sleep?

Liebergott asked for the crew to switch on the fans in the tanks of liquid oxygen, hoping to nudge the system into life and help him understand the problem.

Flight Director Gene Krantz explains.

It's a super dense, super cold liquid at launch at temperatures of minus 300 to minus 400 degrees packed in vacuum tanks.

But by the time you're two days into the mission, you've used some of these resources, and these consumables have turned into a very thick, soupy fog or a vapor in the tank.

And like fog on Earth, it tends to stratify or develop in layers.

So inside the tanks, we have some fans we turn on to stir up this mixture and

make it uniform so we can measure it.

And then we use some heaters to raise the pressure for the sleep period.

Well, we had asked the crew to do this.

We advised the crew that we wanted a cryo stir.

13, we've got one more item for you when you get a chance.

We'd like you to stir up your cryotanks.

Jack Swigert acknowledged our request.

Okay, stand by.

Swigert's finger is now on the switch, connected to the fans in the tank that was dropped and damaged 18 months ago.

The tank with the bare electrical wires sitting in a reservoir of pure oxygen.

Sai Liebergat at this time, who is my e-com, had the responsibilities for the cryo systems.

had now switched his attention to the current measurements that he had, the electrical current measurements, and Swagert started the cryo stir.

This is Liebergott checking with one of his backroom support engineers that the data is coming in.

Liebergat saw the currents increase, indicating the stir had started.

All of a sudden, we had just finished the broadcast.

Hayes was still in the spacecraft.

I was taking the camera back down to the command module when suddenly there was

a big bang.

It rocked everything.

I mean, you know, the whole panel coming off from the service module then went through to the command module and everything rocked.

I was partway through the tunnel when I looked up, I looked up at Fred Hayes.

You know, I've been saying, what's going on here?

You know, and I looked at Hayes and he had no idea what was going on.

Then I looked at Swikert.

Swikert's eyes were as wide as saucers.

Swigert had closed the circuit.

Current had flowed in the bare wires and sparked across.

With a source of ignition and a fog of pure oxygen, the remaining Teflon insulation became fuel to the fire, burning ferociously, vaporizing the liquid.

The pressure within the tank spiked rapidly until even the titanium shell could no longer contain it.

It ruptured, filling the surrounding compartment in the service module with oxygen, spreading the fire further.

Pressure continued to build, finally blowing off a whole panel on the side of the service module.

Separated from the fire itself, protected in the command and lunar modules, the astronauts can see none of this.

They can only hear and feel the havoc.

Jim floated back to the command module.

Quickly as I could, I followed.

Quick scan of the instrument panel.

We had six, seven caution warning lights on, the master alarm, and the blue computer restart light on, which was highly confusing because the lights crossed systems.

Back in mission control, Gene Krantz and his team are barely aware that anything's wrong until Swigert calls out over the radio.

Okay, hello here, we've had a problem here.

Capcom Jack Lausmer, in mid-conversation with Gene Krantz, only half-hears him.

Mrs.

Houston, say again, please.

There was a pause for about five seconds.

And then the level comes on.

All right, here's when we've had a problem.

In episode two, confusion reigns.

Nothing made sense in those first few seconds.

Mission control can barely believe what they're seeing, let alone understand it.

That can't be.

I can't believe that right off the bat.

But it soon becomes clear that this will be the fight of their lives.

going down.

We're losing it.

Yes, we are.

13 Minutes to the Moon is an original podcast from the BBC World Service.

Our theme music is by Hun Zimmer and Christian Lundberg.

This episode was written by me, Kevin Fong, and the series producer, Andrew Luck Baker.

In the trench with us was series editor Rami Zabar.

Technical production is by Tim Heffer, and our story editor is Catherine Winter of In the Dark at APM Reports.

Thanks to NASA and the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for the archive interview with Gene Krantz.

Additional thanks to Simon Plumpton, aka Lunar Module 5.

Find out more about the people and the tech behind this amazing story by going to bbcworldservice.com slash 13 minutes, where you can also find season one of our podcast, The Story of the First Moon Landing.

We'd love it if you shared this podcast with your friends.

On social media, our hashtag is 13 Minutes to the Moon.

And where you can, please do leave ratings and reviews in your podcast app.

The World Service Podcast Editor is John Minnell, and the senior podcast producer is Rachel Simpson.

And thanks to our digital team.

Before I go, I just wanted to tell you about another podcast from the BBC World Service, one of our most popular to date.

It deals with an event in Norway that took place in the same year as Apollo 13.

50 years on, Death in Ice Valley is on the case.

An unidentified body in a remote Norwegian valley.

she?

And what was she doing there?

I'm Maritigrov.

And I'm Neil McCarthy.

And in Death in Ice Valley, we tried to find answers to a mystery that has remained unsolved for 48 years.

There are somebody living who knows more about this case.

Tracking down eyewitnesses and using new forensic technology.

Now I'm cutting the truth.

Telling a story set deep in the Cold War.

with strong hints of espionage.

If you take the missile, I will shoot.

But it left us with a lingering feeling that someone didn't want the truth to be known.

Why all this secrecy?

It was like a cover-up.

What on earth happened that day?

That's Death in Ice Valley from the BBC World Service and NRK.

Just search for Death in Ice Valley wherever you get your podcast.

I think we'll break this case right now.

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