Here's an unprecedented look at Apollo 13's damaged Service Module:
NASA's famous Apollo 13 mission launched 50 years ago, and on April 14 the oxygen tank on its Service Module exploded. As you undoubtedly know, the mission's Moon landing was canceled after the explosion, sending the three astronauts into a mad scramble with Mission Control to save their lives. Apollo 13 inspired an award-winning, eponymous film in 1995 starring Tom Hanks as commander Jim Lovell.
At Ars, we have chronicled aspects of the mission in great detail, putting it in the broader context of the Apollo Program, as well as going really deep on what exactly happened during the mission. For this story, we have a special treat—newly remastered images culled from 70mm Hasselblad photographs and stacked frames from 16mm film.
These images were processed and shared with Ars by Andy Saunders, a property developer and semi-professional photographer in northern England who is an Apollo enthusiast. In recent years, he has spent more and more time going into the Apollo archive to dig out new details from images and film. (A larger version of the damaged Apollo 13 Service Module can be seen here.)
[...] While working on Apollo 13 images, Saunders said he was struck by how calm Lovell and the other two crew members, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, appear. Much of the film he worked on was shot in the Lunar Module, after the oxygen tank exploded. The crew was exhausted, it was cold, and the astronauts found themselves in the gravest of situations. And yet they appeared to be in good spirits. "That's test pilots for you, I guess," Saunders said.
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Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13
(published in paperback as Apollo 13)
Hardcover, 378 pages
Houghton Mifflin, October 1994)
ISBN 0-395-67029-2
Apollo 13 lifted off a week or so after my eighteenth birthday. Of course, it had my attention, although not as much as when Apollo 11 landed. Nobody else was much interested by then. At least, until everybody thought all the astronauts onboard were on their way to death.
When I saw the movie Apollo 13, it seemed realistic. Nothing in the movie contradicted anything I remembered seeing in the newspaper or that Walter Cronkite said. I looked for this book in every library I had access to, unsuccessfully. Then I got the movie out again and decided to just buy the book a few weeks ago. I found a used hardcover copy on Amazon only a buck or two more expensive than the e-book.
I didn't have to read far to realize that the movie wasn't nonfiction. It was "based on a true story" and its makers dishonestly advertised it as nonfiction. Much of the movie was made up out of whole cloth.
It was co-written by Jeffrey Kluger, a journalist, and Apollo 13 Mission Commander Jim Lovell. Wikipedia informs me that the book was Kluger's idea, and pitched it to the two surviving Apollo 13 astronauts; Jack Swigert had died of cancer in 1982. "Fredo," as Lovell called Fred Haise, wasn't interested in the idea.
The prologue starts off with the debunking of an urban myth that said that astronauts had poison pills they could take if they were ever stranded in space.
This is a serious book about a serious incident in history. Chapter one starts "Jim Lovell was having dinner at the White House when his friend Ed White burned to death" about the Apollo 8 fire, although later it was found that the smoke poisoned them. It goes on describing how Lovell was a nerd who loved rockets as a teenager, and spoke of test piloting and early space flights before it gets around to the Apollo 13 launch.
It's an excellent book, very well written. I found it enjoyable and informative. Any high school teacher who thinks about showing the class the fictional movie based on this fine book would be wise to read the book first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @03:38PM
Here's one,
https://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/X-15/Small/E-14182.jpg [nasa.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @09:34PM
The dialog that was real seemed real. The fictional dialog stood out.
After the explosion, in the movie there was a conflict in the crew. They argued and blamed each other, which was unproductive and generally harmful.
When I saw the movie, that really broke the spell for me. Instantly, all I could see was a crew composed of wimpy whiny Hollywood losers. They were anything but Real Men. Experienced military test pilots of that era, especially ones who had passed NASA's extreme psychological testing, would not lose control in that way.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday April 15 2020, @03:20AM
Not much to debate, but I want to say that stories like these are very nice to see here.