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Archives at The Museum of Flight


Apollo 13 (Spacecraft)

 Organization

Historical Note

Apollo 13 was the seventh crewed mission in NASA’s Apollo space program, and was planned to be the third lunar landing. Crewed by astronauts James A. Lovell, Jr., John L. Swigert, Jr., and Fred W. Haise, Jr., it launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970. The lunar landing and mission were aborted after an explosion in the service module caused the loss of two oxygen tanks.

The mission’s failure focused public attention on the space program. All three astronauts survived the landing largely unharmed. The craft orbited for six days before eventually making an emergency landing in the South Pacific on April 17, 1970. It was recovered, and the astronauts rescued, by the USS Iwo Jima.

(Historical note derived from “Apollo 13.” Nasa Content Administrator, NASA. July 8, 2009. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo13.html. "Apollo 13". Wikipedia, Jun 11, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13.)

Citation

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo13.html

Found in 1 Collection or Record:

Michael A. Poirier Apollo 13 Recovery Collection

 Collection — Multiple Containers
Identifier: 2009-04-15
Contents of the Collection The Michael Poirier Apollo 13 Recovery Collection is a small collection comprised of film footage and photomechanical prints relating to the recovery of the Apollo 13 spacecraft by the USS Iwo Jima on April 17 1970. The film footage, which was shot by Poirier and is about ten minutes long, depicts both a SIMEX (simulation exercise) of the Apollo 13 recovery using a boilerplate Command Module (CM), as well as the actual recovery of the real CM. Several shots feature U.S. Navy...

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