This 10,700 word, profusely illustrated monograph of Beyond the Stars –NASA’s 50 Years of Manned Space Flight
Apollo 13 – A Successful Failure, Part 5 contains unpublished photos, behind the scenes drama and the most complete rendition of the April 11, 1970 space flight published in decades. Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft launched on April 11, 1970 at 2:13pm, EST. on a ten-day mission The space craft crew consisted of James A. Lovell, Jr. commander, John (Jack) L. Swigert, Jr., command module pilot, and Fred W. Haise, Jr. lunar module pilot.
The Saturn V rocket lifted the command-service module called Odyssey off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Inside the rocket was the lunar module Aquarius. The five engines of the second stage of the rocket ignited, and burned smoothly for five and a half minutes. Then an anomaly occurred. The crew felt a small vibration, and the center engine shut down, two minutes early. The engineers in Houston corrected the problem by firing the remaining four engines thirty-four seconds longer than planned. This would make up for the lost thrust. The third stage burned nine seconds longer to put them in Earth orbit. Mission Control decided this would not affect the mission to the Moon.
“We heaved a sigh of relief thinking we had gotten through what probably would be the one major glitch in the mission,” said Eugene Kranz, the mission’s chief flight director.
