The first moon landing was in July 1969 with Apollo 11. Apollo 12 followed in November 1969, and also landed successfully. In April 1970, Apollo 13 was a different story. The ill-fated space flight of Apollo 13 gave us the unforgettable phrase, “Houston, we have a problem.”

I have read Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. It is written by Jim Lovell who was commander of that flight, and his co-author Jeffrey Kluger. It is a thick book, filled with painful details. It is hard going, and I cannot read every word. It looks at more than the ill-fated flight of Apollo 13. It starts with the deaths of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. In 1967, the cockpit of Apollo 1 caught fire during a practice countdown. From this, you get an awful feeling of foreboding. If this book was fiction, all this would be “foreshadowing” and I would say it was improbable. But Lost Moon is not fiction, it is fact, about the explosion of an oxygen tank on the service module on the way to the moon.

The flight was Apollo 13, the explosion took place on April 13, 1970. On page 80, something is made of the “13” problem—an unlucky number. Commander Jim Lovell did not believe in the number 13 as bad luck. However, astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise had to fly a crippled ship, swing around the moon without landing (ie. Lost Moon) and come home—with their spaceship falling apart underneath them. They were low on oxygen, low on power, with deadly carbon dioxide building up, and with not enough heat. Needing oxygen, they climbed into the Lunar Excursion Module and used it as a lifeboat. There was also the chance that on reentry, they would bounce off the earth’s atmosphere and careen off into endless space. Highly improbable, if this was fiction. Absolutely harrowing, as it was fact.

Not all the action took place on the spacecraft. Mission Control in Houston filled pages and pages of the book. They were forever finding something else wrong with Apollo 13 and telling the astronauts to fix it. Meanwhile, Marilyn Lovell was trying to keep it together in front of her children and the guests who crowded around the TV in the living room. She put Jim’s elderly mother in the den with the other TV set, where it was quiet. Blanch could talk to the nice astronauts who came to visit her.

“In front of the television set, they flinched a bit at the words ‘lifeboat’ and “emergency’ …But if Blanch Lovell heard anything amiss, she didn’t show it. She turned to the handsome young men on either side of her—both astronauts like her son, but no doubt just ordinary ones, or else they would be flying in space today, and he would be the one following things on TV—and smiled at
them. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin smiled back.”

Obviously, Lovell, Swigert and Haise got home safely, or this book would not have been written. But what a ride it was! Check out Lost Moon from the Pine Bush Area Public Library, and you too can say, “Houston, we have a problem.”

Find it in the non-fiction section of Pine Bush Area Public Library, and you, too, can say,

“Houston, we have a problem.”