When Apollo 13 lifted off on April 11, 1970, manned space flight was one day shy of the ninth anniversary of Gagarin’s flight. In the intervening years, the actual flights had been unexpectedly safe. Thirty-seven times, men had sat atop rockets and been blasted off into space; thirty-six times, they had returned safely. Only once—if one discounted rumors of unacknowledged Russian catastrophes—had a flight resulted in a fatality: In April 1967, Vladimir Komarov of the Soviet Union had perished after his parachutes failed to deploy properly during an emergency entry. Of the thirty-six crews that
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