Science Friday - Remembering Apollo 13 Astronaut James Lovell

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Last week, astronaut James Lovell died at the age of 97. In April of 1970, he was the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, which launched with three astronauts en route to the moon. While in space, however, the craft encountered a serious problem: an explosion in one of its fuel tanks that severely damaged the craft and disabled its electrical system, prompting the famous phrase, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” In 1995, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the mission, Host Ira Flatow spoke with Lovell about the historic flight and how good luck and ingenuity among the crew and mission controllers on the ground combined to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth.Guest:James Lovell was a NASA astronaut and commander of the Apollo 13 mission.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi, I'm Ira Flato, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today on the podcast, the commander of Apollo 13, astronaut Jim Lovell, and the real-life space drama that prompted the iconic Houston, we've had a problem. That's when we got to be starting to worry about whether we would ever get home again. We're remembering James Lovell, commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 flight. He died last week at the age of 97. I have done thousands of interviews on this program, but some like this one really stick with me. Back in 1995, I had the chance for a long conversation with Lovell.

It was the week of the 25th anniversary of their historic nail-biting flight and the safe return to Earth. I think you'll agree it still holds its drama 30 years later. There are certain dramatic events one remembers very vividly, you know, like remembering where you were when you heard the news about Kennedy or King? Well, for me, Apollo 13 falls into that category, too. I'll never forget that night. I was home in bed around 11 o'clock, 10 11 o'clock at night, glued to the radio, listening, sleepless to a heart-pumping drama that would play out all night. Awaiting news about the lives of three people I had never even met before, who were cast adrift in a lifeboat with no hope for rescue from any other ship nearby, but with the slim possibility

that if they were lucky and smart and sprung no leaks, their lifeboat would find its way home. But first it had to cross a huge ocean, perform in uncharted waters, and survive a fate that no other ship before it had ever faced. It seems just like yesterday. And the command pilot who had twice attempted to set foot on the moon, and who was twice denied the opportunity. Jim Lovell is my guest here today. He joins us by phone from his hotel in Costa Mesa, California. Welcome to the program. Good morning, Iowa. How are you? Fine. What's the afternoon now? Well, wherever you are, you know what Einstein says. What are you up to these days? Well, last night, I attended the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 13 incident, and we celebrated

on the 13th, which was what we call Boom Day. Is there sort of a black humor about this now? Well, you have to have a little humor, you know, in tight situations. You weren't very humorous, and I was back 25 years ago on that night, were you? No, I was a little apprehensive, a little frustrated, just about everything. Did you really, in your heart of hearts, believe you were going to get out of that situation? Well, when the explosion first occurred, we didn't know the severity of it because we were losing fuel cells, but one fuel cell would have been sufficient for us to get home, and then we saw the oxygen going out that we knew that the third fuel cells,

cell would die, and then pretty soon the whole command module would collapse on us. And that's when we got to be starting to worry about whether we would ever get home again. You've said that if the explosion had happened earlier or later, you and the crew would not have survived. Why is that? That's true. If the explosion occurred just after we committed ourselves to leave the Earth and go to the moon, we would not have had enough battery power in the lunar module to make that transit all the way around the moon, and we could not turn back because uh... we had no ability to fire our command modules engines because we lost all electrical power

had with this explosion occurred after we were orbiting the moon and we had detached to go down to the lunar surface uh... we would not have had enough fuel of the lunar module once we got back up to get out of lunar orbit and uh... propeller cells back to the earth so that was really the only lucky part of the mission yes it was very very fortunate that if we were going to have an explosion to have a to have it at that time.

Three big men were able to squeeze into a little lunar module equipped for two people that was only designed for two people for two days. The story of how you got enough air to breathe and water and food to live on is fascinating. What did you have to do to turn that into a lifeboat? Well, we had to do several things. First of all, we had to use its propulsive system to reestablish the proper course of the way home. then we had to use the same propulsion system to speed up our return home because as you mentioned, that vehicle was designed only for 45 hours and two people.

And as I looked around, I counted three. And I didn't want to be left behind, so I thought we better stretch it out. And also we had to use his guidance system for a while, so we had to transfer all that guidance information from the dying command module into the lunar module. And since the temperature was dropping anyway, it was kind of crowded, but our body warmth kept us comfortable just a little bit. You know, the space program of the last 40 years is always filled with defining moments when something happens, and a technician or an engineer or somebody makes that incredible decision about to go or not to go

or to do something. What was that moment on your flight? Well, there were several moments because we had crisis to overcome all the way home. I think the first critical decision was the crew's decision to get into the lunar module, which came quite a bit earlier than when the ground finally realized that we did have all these things going wrong with us. And we got in there and turned on those systems with just enough time to transfer the guidance information. That was the first critical. The second one was a ground decision that says, let's get them back on that free return course again.

and they did that. The third one was a decision that was not a hard one to decide, but Hayes came up and said, we don't have enough battery power in the lunar module to get home and the ground agreed at the same time, and then they

said they think we have a solution, and that was their decision to burn the engine for a second time for a long period of time after we passed the back of the moon. And of course the final decision was to again readjust our course, which was necessary, but we had to do that by the seat of the past

because we had turned off all those exotic electronic devices to help us navigate. See, we had our navigation equipment in the command module. We had very similar equipment in the lunar module. And we held those two, made it together all the way home. But after we lit our engine for the second time and headed on for about four and a half minutes, then we shut everything down to save electrical power

so that we'd have enough power to keep control of the vehicle all the way home. And when we did that, we had to turn off all the exotic electronic navigation equipment, so we lost in the memory of the computer, the position of the navigable stars, and we turned off the guidance system, so the platform went down. The autopilot wouldn't work anymore, and we thought that we could just coast back on we called the free return course until we found out that we had to make another adjustment. So we did lose those equipments as far as being able to use them, but they were still in the module. There were a couple of times in the mission where your microphones were on, and you didn't know it,

and you said some things that you may have later regretted, but probably not anymore. But there was one interesting comment that you said to Fred Hasey said, I'm afraid this is going to be the last moon mission for a long time. That didn't pan out that way, did it? Oh, no. I said that. Well, first of all, I thought I was on what we called Vox, voice activated, or push to talk. Right.

In other words, I thought I'd have to push the button before anything would go outside of the spacecraft. And so I was just talking to Fred. We were looking at the moon just as we got in there and said that this is good. I could take a good look at the moon, Fred. It's going to be a long time before anybody gets back here. Why did you say that? Because that's exactly what I thought at the time. I guess it's...

We had no propulsion, we had no electricity, we had no, you know, nothing. And I knew that NASA was going to have to do some real great research. And, of course, there was still a great chance that we'd never get back alive. And you were able to, at one point, to turn around and actually see the exploded oxygen tank on the side of the service module. And your reaction must have been incredible about the amount of damage you could see. Well, just before we hit the Earth's atmosphere on the way home, we jettison the service module, we maneuvered slightly so that as it tumbled by, hopefully we could take some pictures,

which that occurred. We took some pictures and saw the whole side of the spacecraft blown off. And how long did it take for them to find out what really went wrong? It took about three months of intensive investigation after the splashdown. We looked at the history of the spacecraft building. We went back and looked at the telemetry. We reproduced in laboratories what we thought went wrong. We had a pretty good idea, you know, fairly shortly.

But we had to reproduce the situation by testing, and then we finally got the answer. Most accidents in aircraft are caused by a series of incidents that either overcome the pilot and or the airplane. This was a classic example of that situation. The accident was set up five years before we took off. When NASA at that time, it formed all the contractors to make the electrical equipment in the spacecraft compatible with the high voltage, which I think was about 65-volt-PC voltage at Cape Kennedy, even though the spacecraft flew with only 28-volt-d-c power, and the main reason was they could do some testing a lot quicker at the Cape with the higher voltage.

everybody did except the fellow who built the heater system in the oxygen tank the heater system had a little thermostat to prevent it from getting too hot but it was compatible with only the 28-bolt power and not the higher voltage that was available to cape the he made mention of later on that when they discovered what a good lifeboat that the laam could be that it was changed to be able to be on a lifeboat in what ways was was the limb changed to be more hospitable? Or does that you know that it was changed? Well, I don't think it was changed physically

as much as the procedures were incorporated in case that this thing happened again. I see. That the lunar module could be used as an auxiliary propulsion system or a living space while there was something wrong with a command module. We're talking this hour about the dangerous mission of Apollo 13. Jim Lovell, a commander of Apollo 13 and an astronaut for many years, and author of the book Lost Moon,

The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, published by Houton Mifflin, which has been made into a film starring Tom Hanks, and we'll find out, does Tom Hanks do a good Jim Lovell, Jim? Oh, yeah, he's an excellent actor. I didn't ask that question. I said, they did he do a good Jim Lovell. He spent four days down with me, and he got the character down pretty Pat,

and he was a closet astronaut. He always wanted to play the part of, of an astronaut when he got in the acting business, and he finally found the product that he wanted to do. More of my 1995 interview with the late Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell in just a moment. It gives me a little bit of sense of satisfaction to be on a flight that had such an interesting beginning, middle, and ending. Stay with us. That's just what I'm saying. The time to do it is now, guidance.

Flight again. Go guidance. As long as... You're listening to the audio from Apollo 13 Mission Convention. control in Houston. It was a little after 10 p.m. on the night of April 13th, 1970. Over the hours that followed, the ground controllers and the astronauts on board Apollo 13 would have to come up with a way to deal with the damage from an onboard explosion, an inventor way to get the crippled spacecraft and its crew back home safely.

All right. Both have mattered as well as, want you to tell them what paid you want in the checklist. Okay. What's the matter? We've got more on a problem. Okay, listen to you guys. We've lost a fuel cell one. Instrumentation, fines. Let me add them up.

Okay, stand by. We may have had an instrumentation. Okay, let's get our instrumentation lined up here, you guys. ECS, what are you got? Browning, you copying it? Hair to ground. We're playing excerpts from a 1995 interview with Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell. It was the week of the 25th anniversary of the flight, and sure enough, the movie starring Tom Hanks would come out but a few months later.

You and your co-author Jeffrey Kluger have captured some of the real drama that was going on. I mean, the real drama of that first night and subsequent nights that we sat through and listened to. And in particular, when it came time where you and your fellow astronauts had to push a button, and it had to be the exact right button. And if you didn't push that button at that moment, it was curtains. The lights were out forever. Fred and I were the lunar module,

and it would ruin our whole day if he had just by mistake. And there was one point where one of the astronauts, I guess the commander, the command module astronaut, had to transfer the data from the command module into the lunar module, and you had to do it by voice. And first he had to mentally make calculations, do a little bit of arithmetic, and he so distrusted himself in that time of stress that he wasn't sure what five times three was.

But that must have been, you have to control your fear in that case so much just to understand what five times three is that the pressure must have been enormous. It was pretty high, yes. Is there anything in your training that makes you prepared for that moment? Well, I think the background of all three of us was a big help to this situation, because all three of us were test pilots. All three of us had been in, you know, a stressful situation before in airplanes that weren't behaving the way they should. And so that, that, uh, those familiarity with the stressful environment, I think, really helped us. All right, we have a lot

of people who'd like to ask some questions, so let me go to the phone. Mike in Coralville, Iowa. Hi, Mike. Hi. Mr. Lovell. It's a pleasure to talk to him. A very big admirer of yours. My question for you was, was there any one time? that you were completely despaired that you would not get back and consequently was there a time when you just came to a realization that you

were going to get back? To answer your first question there was never a time when we were completely disbared. There was a time of greatest apprehension was when we shortly after the explosion occurred and we saw the oxygen escaping

from the spacecraft and we realized that very shortly the command module would die, and we didn't have solutions at that time of how we're going to survive the entire trip back home. The command module was the only thing that had a heat shield. Oh, yeah. Let's go now to Barry in Philadelphia. Hi, Barry.

Hi. Thank you very much. I'd like to know what kind of extraterrestrial experiences you, gentlemen, experienced during this mishap that you had there. Do you mean anything that strange that we saw that we didn't understand? Yes. Well, in the first state of the moon, we saw a couple dark shadows or shafts out in the void someplace someplace, which we couldn't quite identify at the time, but we think that they were

pieces of debris that had followed us to the moon after the explosion, and were blotting out some of the stars. But quite frankly, none of us, and none of the astronauts that I know of, believe in what we call so-called UFOs. We all believe that there's life in the universe, intelligent life, as we know, but foreign visitors around the earth that come from some other galaxy or some other star system. Why is it that NASA could command such great attention from the public and have thousands of reporters in the 60s and the 70s? And now when the shuttle is up and they're astronauts up, you hardly see a mention of it anywhere. Have we really lost the desire for spaces? Are we jaded?

Jim Lovell. What do you think it is? Well, I think it's a natural tendency. Remember, before the explosion occurred on Apollo 13, and that was 25 years ago, none of the networks carried it. The flight, it was on page 78 of the New York Times about two days before the flight. That was the only mention of the flight. And we become complacent with spaceflight, and it wasn't until the accident occurred that there was just great interest.

I guess it was like going to an automobile race. Everybody's waiting for the crash on the first curve. And we've had over 60-some shuttle flights now, and they've become very routine. And I look at the shuttle as a proven vehicle, much like an airplane, and the action occurs inside the payload bay, whether we're putting up a new satellite or doing it in space. Let's go to the phones to Dan in Norfolk, Virginia. Hi, Dan. Hi.

Mr. Lovell, this is an honor. I'd like to know if you could take the opportunity to tell us about your crewmates, Fred Hayes and the late Jack Swaggart. Yes, I couldn't have picked two better crewmates to weather the accident with me than Jack Swackard and Fred Hayes. Of course, as you know, Jack was not the original command module pilot on this flight. Ken Manate and he was. and we were exposed to the measles four days before we were to take off and Manley being a bachelor, everybody was sure he was going to come down with him

and so they replaced him with Swikert because Swikert had the measles and he died unfortunately in early 1983 Fred Hayes is still actively employed with the Grumman Northrop or Marriott why forget exactly who they went with, but that that organization and both all three are very competent and of course all three are the book. All right, thanks for calling, Dan. Thank you. Are you the only person who has ever gone to the moon twice and not set foot on it?

And is this a great disappointment now as you look back? Yes, because the Apollo 13 was going to be the peak of my career. I was going to land on the moon. I told everybody, including the press, that this is my last flight, I would go into NASA management or something like that. and I thought I couldn't think of a better way of capping a career. And then, of course, we didn't land. And when the explosion first occurred, of course, there was a lot of frustration

because we lost a fuel cell. The mission rules said that we couldn't land without all three fuel cells operating. And then, of course, it was one of survival. We forgot about the frustration. Now I look at it sort of wistly that it was really a sense of a great triumph to take an almost certain catastrophe and then bring this thing. home safely with the help of the ground. And it gives me a little bit of sense of satisfaction to be on a flight that had such an interesting beginning, middle, and ending.

John in Encinitas, California. Hi, John. Hi, guys. And I like to say hi to Jim. It's really incredible to be able to talk to you on the phone. I've been listening to you for half an hour. I've got to say you guys were incredibly cool under unbelievable pressure. That's the one thing I'd like to say. But then I have a technical question on top of that. Go ahead. You said that the oxygen thermostat, the heater for the oxygen tank had a 28-volt, I think it was, a thermostat on it, or it should have been 65-volt. So I assume that burnt out at some point. But then what happened? I mean, what was the sequence beyond?

Okay, yes, I didn't finish my story there. The second incident occurred. The tank was dropped slightly at the factory years before it was to be put into the service module. they retested it. And then about six weeks before takeoff, before six weeks, we had a countdown demonstration test of where we completely filled a tank full of oxygen. And the tank worked perfectly for everything that would have to do in flight. After the test, the ground crew went in to remove the oxygen,

and when they tried to force it out with the gas, which was the normal procedure, the gas was going out of a set of the liquid. So they looked at the schematics of it. out that there was a loose tube, and that might have occurred when they dropped the tank, and so they decided to use the heater system to boil it out. First time that it was for eight hours of any spacecraft. They turned it on. The heater system worked.

The oxygen started to boil out. The temperature started to rise. As it got to about 80 degrees, the little thermostat started to open up to keep the temperature down. The high voltage well at the contact shut. no safety at all, the temperature kept rising, but no one ever caught the fact that the heater did not turn off at the proper time. It got up to a thousand degrees Fahrenheit in the tank. Damaged all the wiring and damaged the Teflon covering.

You know, this may be a different day and age, but if this news had come out now about something that happened on the shuttle, there would be tremendous congressional hearings and things like this that would be going on. Now in those days, I guess they just said, well, there was a chain of mistakes, life goes on. Well, this was a very fortunate ending to this thing, so therefore it's a lot easier to, you know, to make corrections and go ahead. If we had died on the way home, well, you might never have known what happened. That bad, the thermostat was in all the flights from eight all the way through 13. That's very interesting. For me, if tank rattles, I throw it out. I get a new tank. Well, we debated about changing tanks, but it was delayed the flight another

a month, and since the tank worked perfectly for everything that we had to do in flight that we'd never detank it on the way out to the moon, we saw no problem with it. But that delay, and that month was critical in the period of the space race we're talking about. I mean, there is a tight schedule, and was there sort of the politics of the time that even a month would be too much to delay? Well, there wasn't much of a race anymore, as you recall, we landed on the moon, and Apollo 8 went around it for the very first time. But there was a schedule. schedule to keep it. But safety was still very, very important, and they looked at everything

positively and said the tank was working fine. And they looked at the schematics before we made a decision to go and said, if that little tube is loose, there's no problem. We don't need that little tube on the flight. We'll just turn the heater on and boil the oxygen out, and then we'll keep going. But no one ever thought that it went up to a thousand degrees. We only had a temperature gauge outside the test stand that went to 80, which was a big mistake. All right, let's go to Stevie in Wayland Mass. Hi, Stevie. Hi, I was wondering if I could ask Mr. Lovell, what do you think the future holds for the space program?

Well, that is a big question. I think the future holds a space station probably basically, this is for man's flight, a consortium between Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan, Canada, and the U.S., I think we're finally going to get our act together. It's too bad that we wasted billions on studies that, never came to anything. As many years ago, I think that we're going to start doing some robotic research on the planets of Mars again and perhaps make a little landing on Venus with the eventual idea

of perhaps a man, Mars flight sometime in the next century. Martin in Boise, Idaho. I'm Martin. Hello. It's an honor to speak to you, Mr. Lovell. One question. I realized that the best that we could build at the time, but how would it compare by today's standard? How primitive was it by today's standards?

Well, it is pretty primitive. We had just one type of computer. It was a hard-wired computer. We didn't have such things with floppy disks or all the modern stuff that computers have. I think the shuttle takes off with five of the not all talking to each other. We don't go. And the instrumentation was rather crude compared to what we have today. The technology today would probably be able to reduce the weight considerably. But as far as the technology was with other stuff in those days, it was highly advanced. That computer was actually, we call it the fourth astronaut. All right, Martin? Okay. Thanks for calling. There are still three. There were supposed to be 20 Saturn missions, a Saturn five missions, Apollo missions, and they cut them back to 17,

and there were three Saturn rockets lying around various places around the country. One's at the Cape, one is, what, in Huntsville? Yes. And where's the third one? I'm trying to remember. Johnson Space Center. Johnson's Space. When you drive by and you look at that, do you get pangs when you see that there? It gives me pangs saying, I wish this was standing straight and going someplace, you know? Well, I think one of the tragedies of our decisions in NASA was not to keep the line of the Saturn 5 running a little bit longer.

And I tell you why we spent all that money for research and development. It's a beautiful rocket. It puts more into low Earth orbit than the shuttle does. And when the Challenger accident occurred, we had no backup. And we could have had a fairly inexpensive backup if we kept those Saturn V's on the line. Jim, is there one memory you take away from this more than any other part of the flight? That one thing that stays in your mind? Well, I'll ever forget the side of the moon as we whipped around it for the very last time. My second flight up there, knowing that I never get a third flight. And finally seeing that little triangular mountain that I named on Apollo 8 to Mount Maryland, and it started to disappear in the background. And it was sort of a nostalgic,

wistful feeling. At that time, I think we had a fairly decent idea that we might be able to make through this thing. Okay. Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell died last week at the age of 97. This episode was produced by Charles Berkwist. Plato, thanks for listening.