Apollo 13

by Jim Lovell

Negotiating a terrain that treacherous would require some sublimely good piloting, the kind that would prove not only the soundness of the translunar ships but the skill of the men who had been tapped to fly them. Pull off a mission like that, and the day you return to the familiar waters of the South Pacific ought to be a historic one indeed.

The American space program was born not of ambition or passion or celestial wanderlust, but rather of something closer to fear—the fear of being second best.

There is a thin line between arrogance and confidence, between hubris and true skill, and the engineers and astronauts of NASA spent more than a decade sure-footedly straddling it.

The geologists and chemists may have seen the moon as a scientific horn of plenty, but the engineers and the public saw it as little more than a goal that had to be reached. Once it was reached, there was little purpose in repeating the feat again and again and again.

It was enough to make people start talking about the poison pills.

Just why a major news organization would even have considered shutting down its cameras and punching out for the night when a ship of astronauts was 200,000 miles from home was a complete mystery.

“It’s girl-watching weather. And speaking of girl watching, did you know our first bachelor astronaut is on his way to the moon? It’s Swigert, right? He’s the kind of guy who they say has a girl in every port. Well, that may be, but I think he’s kind of foolishly optimistic taking nylons and Hershey bars to the moon.”

More important to Lovell and the other astronauts here tonight, however, was article 5 of the document—the safe return of space travelers clause. This provision guaranteed that any astronauts or cosmonauts who veered off course and splashed down in a hostile ocean or thumped down in a hostile wheat field would not be scooped up and carted off by security forces of the violated country. Rather, they would be treated as “envoys of mankind,” to be “safely and promptly returned to the state of registry of their space vehicle.”

“That’s a great picture, Jim,” Jack Lousma, the Capcom, encouraged the commander. “You got the light just right.”

“Hey,” Swigert shouted down to Houston, “we’ve got a problem here.” “This is Houston, say again please,” Lousma responded. “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” Lovell repeated for Swigert.

Among the men in the Canaveral blockhouse and the Houston control room, there was no greater tribute a controller could be paid than to describe him, in the rough poetry of the rocketry community, as a “steely-eyed missile man.”