Lost Moon

• 1. Introduction

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  Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 opens with a premise that sounds like failure. In April 1970, three astronauts set out for the Moon on what was supposed to be the third lunar landing in history. They never got there. An oxygen tank exploded inside the Service Module, knocking out the power and propulsion systems of the spacecraft they were depending on to get home. What happened next became one of the most gripping survival stories in the history of space exploration.

  Astronaut Jim Lovell commanded that mission. More than two decades later, he sat down with journalist Jeffrey Kluger to write about what it was like. The book they produced, published by Houghton Mifflin in October 1994, became the foundation for a major Hollywood film. But before the cameras rolled, there was the question of how to tell the story at all, and which of the men who lived it would be willing to revisit it.

• 2. The Collaboration

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  Jeffrey Kluger first approached Jim Lovell in 1991 about working together on the book, three years before it would reach shelves. The two men Lovell flew with on Apollo 13 were Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. Haise chose not to take part in the project. Swigert, the Command Module pilot, could not participate at all. He had died of cancer in 1982.

  That left Lovell as the sole astronaut voice in the collaboration, partnered with a journalist who had not been there. Kluger brought the writer's craft; Lovell brought firsthand memory of a mission that had gone catastrophically wrong at the worst possible moment. The result was a 378-page hardcover that attempted to reconstruct the full arc of what the crew and flight controllers went through, from launch to splashdown.

• 3. What Went Wrong

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  Apollo 13 was not the first or second attempt to land on the Moon. It was the third, and the program carried high expectations. The mission unraveled when a liquid oxygen tank inside the Service Module exploded. The explosion hit the Command Module, named Odyssey, at its most vulnerable point: the systems that generated electrical power and controlled propulsion.

  With Odyssey crippled, the lunar landing was immediately abandoned. But the larger problem was survival. Lovell, Swigert, and Haise were close to the Moon, far from Earth, and their primary spacecraft could no longer sustain them. Flight controllers on the ground began working through a solution that had never been rehearsed. The Lunar Module, a craft designed to descend to the Moon's surface and return, would have to serve as a lifeboat. Its name was Aquarius.

• 4. Aquarius as Lifeboat

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  Aquarius was built for a specific, limited job: carry two astronauts to the lunar surface and back up to orbit. It was not designed to keep three men alive for the duration of a return trip to Earth. What made the rescue possible was the improvised adaptation of its electrical, propulsion, and life support systems to do exactly that.

  Flight controllers on the ground worked through each constraint in turn, finding ways to stretch resources that were never meant to stretch. The crew had to survive on minimal power, manage carbon dioxide levels in a craft not designed for three occupants, and execute precise navigational burns without the instruments they had trained to rely on. The safe return of Lovell, Swigert, and Haise came down to a series of decisions made under pressure by people on both sides of the radio link.

• 5. From Page to Screen

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  Lost Moon appeared in hardcover in October 1994. Within a year, it had become the basis for a major film. Ron Howard directed the adaptation, released in 1995 under the title Apollo 13. Tom Hanks took the role of Jim Lovell.

  The book was later reissued in paperback under the simpler title Apollo 13, matching the film's name and reaching readers who came to the story through the movie first. The shift from the original title to the film's title reflected how thoroughly the cinematic version had shaped public awareness of the mission. Lovell's account, written with Kluger, gave the filmmakers a primary source written by the man who had actually commanded the spacecraft.