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    55 years ago today, a liquid oxygen tank in the Command-Service module of Apollo 13 explodes, turning the lunar mission into a perilous rescue operation.
    Space

    55 years ago today, a liquid oxygen tank in the Command-Service module of Apollo 13 explodes, turning the lunar mission into a perilous rescue operation.

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    1. PerAsperaAdMars on

      I hope that the CO2 scrubbers for Starship and Blue Moon would be interchangeable.

    2. TaskForceCausality on

      Scary thing is , the explosion happened at *just the right time* to permit safe recovery of the crew.

      Had the SM blew earlier , there wouldn’t be enough life support left to get the crew back . Had it blown later – especially during Sweigerts solo orbit of the moon’s backside during comm blackout with Earth- the whole crew would’ve died.

      Bonus, Lovell and Haise would’ve perished on the Moon with no way home and no insight on what happened to the CM. Sweigert would’ve died alone and in terror on a broken command module, unable to fix the problems fast enough to save himself and the ship.

      Worse, *humanity would never know the truth behind it*.

      Apollo 13 would become a MH-17 style enigma, an enduring and unsolvable mystery. We’d forever wonder what happened to those astronauts. Did a meteorite hit the CM ship? Was there a catastrophic power failure? Did something fail earlier and only manifest itself later in the mission?

      For all the horrors , Apollo 13 might well have been the luckiest mission in the series.

    3. Leek5 on

      NASA was really embarrassed about it and wanted it to be forgotten. They even loan the command module to a museum in France. So they didn’t have to look at it. It just sat there striped of parts and on a pallet. With a piece of paper that say what it was. So when Apollo 13 the film came out. It show just how amazing everyone was and something to be proud of. But of course they were embarrassed again. Because people started asking where the command module was. So Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center offer to go and pick it up. It is now restored at that museum if you wanted to go look at it.