Apollo 13: 1. Time bomb

13 Minutes Presents: The Space Shuttle

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, History

9.5 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2020

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Nasa’s third mission to land astronauts on the Moon almost ends in tragedy. Apollo 13 is doomed from the start - it will never touch down on the lunar surface. Even before launch, a last-minute crew change and superstitions about the number 13 cast a shadow over the spaceflight. When an explosion triggers a catastrophic cascade of events, the space crew’s lives hang in the balance.

Hosted by Kevin Fong.

Archive: Nasa and CBS Johnson Space Center Oral History Project

Starring: Jim Lovell Marilyn Lovell Fred Haise John Aaron Gerry Griffin Gene Kranz, courtesy of the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Charlie Duke Jay Lovell Sy Liebergot Jack Lousma

Written by Kevin Fong and Andrew Luck-Baker

Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg for Bleeding Fingers Music.

Produced by the BBC Radio Science Unit for the BBC World Service. This episode was updated on 16 March 2020.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Mariana Spring, the BBC's social media investigations correspondent.
0:06.0	In my podcast, I've been investigating what happened to the daughter of a conspiracy theorist who died having rejected chemotherapy.
0:13.0	It would mean the world to me if I could make it that she wasn't just another in the long line of people that die in this way.
0:19.0	How does this reflect the rise of health conspiracy theories on social media and beyond?
0:24.8	The new series of Mariana in Conspiracy Land.
0:27.9	Listen on BBC Sounds. Friday, April 17th, 1970.
0:42.1	This is the closing act of the mission of Apollo 13, NASA's aborted expedition to the moon.
0:49.4	Four days ago, their spacecraft was crippled by an explosion.
0:53.6	Since then, mission control has battled round the clock just to keep the crew alive.
0:59.0	Across the globe, millions of radios and television sets are tuned in to witness the astronaut's fate.
1:06.0	The world is watching, waiting.
1:09.0	We're now coming to the moment, the last moments of Apollo 13, as it comes in, as it begins
1:15.6	its re-entry. The best thing we can do now is just to listen and hope.
1:20.6	The last few seconds down to re-entry, at this point there's very little anybody can do, including the astronauts,
1:28.3	except wait as they come in through the uppermost fringes of the Earth's atmosphere.
1:33.3	You're coming back from the moon at 35,000 feet per second. That is haul in the mail. And you've got to do it just right.
1:45.9	The computers put them on course.
1:49.3	All anybody can do now is cross their fingers.
1:53.6	NASA has never known anything like it.
1:57.1	An explosion, hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth, a spacecraft leaking oxygen and losing power.
2:04.0	A crew freezing in the darkness at risk of suffocation.
2:05.9	This is the final moment of truth.
	...

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