1023- Apollo 13, a successful failure [Pills of History]

Video from the channel La Biblioteca di Alessandria about Apollo 13, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 31:36. Language: Italian. Video type: Documentary.

An Italian-language documentary episode, part of a series on space exploration, that revisits Apollo 13 as a successful failure. The mission was meant to land two men on the lunar surface again and leave a third in orbit. After the explosion, everything became about bringing the crew back to Earth alive.

The narrator first covers the crew changes. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, was a candidate for commander after recovering from Ménière's disease. When symptoms reappeared, the crews of Apollo 13 and Apollo 14 were swapped. The crew thus became Jim Lovell, an Apollo 8 veteran, Ken Mattingly and Fred Haise. A few days before launch, a backup crew member was exposed to rubella. Mattingly had never had it, so NASA replaced him with Jack Swigert. The video attributes the decision not to delay the mission to budget cuts.

The mission launched on April 11. During ascent, one of the Saturn's second-stage engines failed, and the other four compensated by burning longer. The spacecraft consisted of the lunar module Aquarius and the command and service module Odyssey. After orbiting Earth, it set off for the Moon. The crew's broadcasts barely drew any audience on American networks by then.

On April 14, while stirring the oxygen tanks, a loud bang was heard. A fuel cell stopped working and one of the tanks emptied out. The episode notes that Swigert's actual words were in the past tense: "Houston, we've had a problem." The crew moved into the lunar module and, to get back, looped around the Moon. The Saturn's third stage crashed near the Apollo 12 landing site, and its seismometers recorded the impact. The return was very harsh: around 10°C in the cabin, water rationed to about 200 ml a day, Haise running a fever from a bladder infection, and an improvised adapter for the carbon dioxide filters. Mattingly rehearsed procedures in the simulators. After a radio blackout longer than expected, the capsule returned with its parachutes open. The episode closes with the cause — a tank damaged before the flight and a heater running at the wrong voltage — and with the budget cuts that followed. It ends with two anecdotes: the joke invoice Grumman sent to North American Rockwell, and the Soviet Luna 16 mission, launched on September 12, 1970, which brought back about 100 g of lunar samples.