NASA has had a lot of successful missions in the past that have brought the human race closer to space exploration and finding out what lies beyond our planet. However, there was one mission that never achieved its objective but is still celebrated as one of the key moments in NASA’s operations.

Source: Youtube

Yes, we are talking about the launch of the Apollo 13 mission that never reached the moon as the space agency marked the 50th year of its anniversary on April 11th, 2020.

This is the same mission in which Commander Jim Lovell said the phrase “Houston, we’ve had a problem” which then became an important part of pop culture and the shortened version “Houston, we have a problem” is used quite a lot in movies and TV shows.

NASA considers this mission “a successful failure” because just after two days of its launch towards the moon, an explosion occurred which almost destroyed the primary spacecraft but Lovell and fellow crew members Fred Haise and Jack Swigert returned to the Earth without any injury. All the credit for this goes to the crew of the Mission Control that ran operations from the ground.

The big celebration NASA had planned for the 50th anniversary could not take place because of coronavirus but it did release a documentary with all the footage from the mission.

Source: The Verge

In Apollo 10: Home Safe, you can find interviews of Lovell, Haise, NASA flight directors Gene Kranz and Glyn Lunney and engineer Hank Rotter. Jack Swigert who initially spoke the words “Houston, we’ve had a problem here” died in 1982 but clips from the mission feature him in the documentary.

A website called Apollo 13 in Real Time has been created by Ben Feist, a contractor at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston and it contains all the transcripts, video footage, and audio recordings from the mission. From the first words uttered by the astronauts to their safe landing, you can hear it all in the recordings that have now been digitized.

You can always watch the 1985 movie Apollo 13 that revolves around this mission, featuring Tom Hanks as Lovell to understand how the event actually went down because all the astronauts were involved in the screenplay.