This is an I-Heart podcast.

The Michael Berry Show.

Captain Lovell, I would first like to talk about Apollo 13 and everything related to that.

And then from there, I'd like to get into your background, your childhood, your life leading up to that, and your professional and personal life since then.

So if we could start with Apollo 13, here we are 50 years later, and how would you have

expected before that mission took off? How would you have expected that it would be remembered

by history? Only the way all the other flights that were successful would have been displayed by this time.

Of course, Apollo 1, I mean, that landed on the moon, Paul 11, I should say, was very instrumental.

But, you know, how many people remember Apollo 14, 15, 16, and 17 as other than successful landings on the moon?

Well, it's interesting, and I guess we can go straight to that.

You know, it's been referred to as the successful failure, man over machine.

And many people have suggested that the fact that there were so many problems and that it was put at risk really showed America, hey, this isn't a routine thing.

This is really dangerous.

So it's almost as if in some ways, whether it was God's destiny or his choice or luck,

it is as if it was good that this happened.

Well, it was good in some respects because by the time of 13 flew, this was the fifth Apollo flight to the moon.

And naturally, people started to get complacent about our Apollo program.

We had it successfully landed on Apollo 11.

We repeated that on Apollo 12.

Apollo 13 was going to make a landing a different place, but to the average person, that wasn't

that significant. They didn't realize how we had planned to do our exploration.

So when the explosion occurred, suddenly the people of the U.S. and, of course, of the Earth

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