the myths of Apollo 13

It is “we have had”, not “we have”. And Jack Swigert spoke, not Jim Lovell.

I think we are all quite used to Hollywood making historical mistakes in film. Almost all movies that claim to be “based on real events” end up compressing, altering, amalgamating, or ignoring what really happened when the needs of the story bend and twist the truths of the story. Don’t get me started on U-571.

Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the Apollo space program and the third with the intention of landing on the moon. The spacecraft was launched from the Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank in the service module failed two days on the mission. Instead, the crew circled the moon and returned safely to Earth on April 17.

However, in the 1995 movie Apollo 13, we saw a story told in a movie that not only took place, actually, in the relatively recent past, but there was also a wealth of audiovisual and visual evidence, not to mention the book. Lost Moon, written by astronaut Jim Lovell, who should know how it was there.

It is actually the pilot of the command module Jack Swigert who utters the fateful words. Except that it didn’t. What he really said was, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

So perhaps it is a little surprising that the key moment of the film, the moment of greatest danger, the moment when he gave us the quote that everyone remembers and that he arrived at the poster of the film, is incorrect. In the film, Tom Hanks, who plays Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell, says, briefly, to the radio microphone: “Houston, we have a problem.” The seriousness and growing panic are obvious in both Hanks’s face and the tone of his voice.

In fact, if you listen to actual NASA recordings of the radio conversation between Apollo 13 and mission control in Houston, it is actually command module pilot Jack Swigert (portrayed in the movie by Kevin Bacon) who utters the fateful words. Except that it didn’t. What he really said was, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Dramatic leave

To be fair to the writers, “we’ve had” lacks the dramatic urgency of “we have,” and having had one of the actors perfectly replicate, Swigert’s tone in the original broadcast could have also undermined the drama: Swigert sounds more confused than panicked, in accordance with the Radio Chatter Pilot Test Act.

Proposed by Tom Wolfe in his seminal book The Right Stuff, every test pilot and astronaut (and most flyers in general, including those that transport us to Heathrow and back), since 1947, have tried to emulate the casual accent from the legendary Chuck Yeager, the man who (officially) first broke the sound barrier.

Swigert is clearly trying to maintain the “aww-shucks-t’wern’t-nothing” facade that is required of all test pilots, but he is equally more curious than concerned at the time. Bumps and jerks are not uncommon on space flight, but are generally harbinger of minor problems.

Deep in space, about 330,000 km from Earth, Apollo 13 was losing breathable air and electrical power.

Not this time. Although none of the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 at the time (Lovell, Swigert, and lunar module pilot Fred Haise) could see it, one of the spacecraft’s oxygen tanks, vital to both breathing oxygen and, what More importantly, the supply of electricity through the 13 fuel cells on board had exploded.

A short in the electrical wiring occurred during a routine procedure called “shaking.” This turned on the fans inside the oxygen tanks, which would spin and stir the oxygen and even compensate for the pressure in the tank. Instead, the spark caused a catastrophic detonation, destroying the tank and damaging adjacent tanks. Deep in space, about 330,000 km from Earth, Apollo 13 was losing breathable air and electrical power.

To be fair to Hollywood, a few seconds after Swigert reported the problem, Lovell airs and informs Houston of the explosion, but again says “we’ve had” we don’t “have.”

Again, at this point, the film departs from history. It shows mission control personnel rushing to find solutions to the potentially lethal problems that now plague the spacecraft. It shows anxiety and confusion, which is certainly true, but avoids the fact that NASA had trained for this crisis.

Well planned

Since the start of the lunar missions, it had been planned to use the attached lunar module as a lifeboat for the crew in case something happened in the command and service module, so while there was certainly concern for the crew and the Disappointment that now no moon landing would occur, procedures were in place and ready to roll. Even the firing of the lunar module engine, shown in the film as a watershed moment, had been carefully practiced and thought through countless hours of simulating field missions.

In fact, that was true of all the efforts that followed to revive the crew except one. The carbon dioxide issue. In an interview in 2017, Lovell said that the buildup of carbon dioxide, the crew’s exhaled breath, was probably the most dangerous aspect of the rescue effort.

Fortunately, disaster turned into a triumph, and it did so for something we have apparently recently forgotten: listening to experts

If carbon dioxide levels had risen too much, the crew could have suffocated, but not before becoming almost insensitive from lack of oxygen. “We faced all kinds of problems, but the one that really stood out was the danger of carbon dioxide build-up,” Lovell told the Observer. “We had no power. It could have killed us.

It was not due, for the most part, to the efforts of those in mission control. With an average age of 29, and many just beyond their college graduations, mission controllers faced an almost hopeless problem; how to rescue a crew that was too far to rescue.

The jury-rigged apparatus that the controllers designed to overcome the carbon dioxide problem was more or less accurately described in the film (he had to create a connection for the square carbon dioxide filters from the command module so that they fit into the round filters of the lunar module) and it showed above all what Lovell says saved the mission and men: teamwork.

There is one last historical inaccuracy: Flight director Gene Kranz (played in the film by Ed Harris) never said “failure is not an option.” However, you may have thought about it, and then took the phrase as the title of your own autobiography.

Listen to experts

Less than a year after the historic first Apollo 11 moon landing, Apollo 13 could have been the worst disaster of the space age: three astronauts adrift in space, sentenced to slow death by suffocation, and all captured live in the evening news. Fortunately, the disaster turned into a triumph, and it did so for something we have apparently forgotten recently: listening to the experts.

Apollo 13 was saved because Lovell, Haise, and Swigert were all expert test pilots and highly trained astronauts, and that’s exactly what they would want in a situation like that.

More importantly, however, they were able to survive thanks to mission control efforts, the egg heads in short-sleeved shirts, narrow ties, and horn-rimmed glasses perpetually engulfed in cigarette smoke.

The controllers were not only experts in their individual fields, but were detained by teams of expert colleagues, from NASA engineers to those of aerospace companies such as Grumman and North American Aviation who had designed and built the two joint spacecraft.

Listening to the experts: it seems to be something we have forgotten how to do, in this era of panic and pandemic, of elections held by the loudest, the shortest, of Brexit and Trump. Experts have mocked and belittled themselves, and have drifted apart when their views, as is often the case, deviate from political orthodoxy.

Spinning in space, hundreds of thousands of miles from their home, with leaking oxygen tanks and their spacecraft losing their ability to keep them alive, Lovell, Swigert, and Haise listened, paid attention, and got home safely. Whatever the inaccuracies in Hollywood, that was something that the movie hit, and something that we all need to pay attention to.