Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search results

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:

Iva and Homer Metz Space Collection

 Collection
Identifier: 2019-11-01
Overview The Iva and Homer Metz Space Collection documents the careers of both Iva and Homer in aviation and the space industry. It follows their time with the U.S. Navy, the Boeing Company, North American Aviation, and at Cape Canaveral during the Apollo and Skylab programs.

The Museum of Flight | 9404 E. Marginal Way South | Seattle WA 98108-4097 | 206-764-5874
Contact us with a research request
curator@museumofflight.org