Houston, we have a problem.
Sufferers of triskaidekaphobia will tell you that the mission was damned from the start. Any sensible organization would have skipped Apollo 13, and gone straight from Apollo 12 to Apollo 14. Buildings go from floor 12 to floor 14, and it's a damn good thing too, or else any building over 12 floors would come crashing to the earth in a hail of dust and mortar.
Apollo 13 was supposed to be the third mission in which men would walk on the moon, and it was the thirteenth mission in a series using the Apollo specification flight equipment. It was launched on 11 April 1970 with the objective of landing on the moon in the Fra Mauro Highlands and to sample the Imbrium Basin in the continuing lunar surface experiments to develop the capability to work on the moon. It never landed on the moon though, much to the chagrin of the crew, comprised of James A. Lovell Jr., John L. Swigert Jr. and Fred W. Haise.
The mission was a failure due to a series of catastrophic events which compounded the already dangerous prospect of propelling through the vacuum of space. The first signs that something was amiss began on the ground when Lieutenant Commander Thomas K. Mattingly came down with a case of German measles three days before the flight. (He was replaced with John Swigert). Right before launch, a helium tank was found with higher than normal pressure. The pressure in the tank was watched closely and was deemed a minor anomaly and dismissed. Shortly after that a liquid O2 valve would not close and had to be recycled several times before it would work properly.
During the flight one of the engines cut off over two minutes too early, and the other engines had to compensate by burning longer than planned. After that the mission was relatively uneventful.
However, the real catastrophe occurred when the liquid oxygen tank in the service module exploded. This tank was pretty important, because it was used by the fuel cells which were used to power the spacecraft. There was an emergency backup, but it was only good for 10 hours, and at the time of the explosion, the crew was 230,000 miles away from Earth.
The explosion, in the words of James Lovell:
"Fred [Haise] was still in the lunar module. Jack [Swigert] was back in the command module in the left-hand seat, and I was half-way in between, in the lower equipment bay, wrestling with TV wires and a camera, watching Fred come on down, when all three of us heard a rather large bang -- just one bang.
Now, before that ... Fred had actuated a valve which normally gives us that same sound. Since he didn't tell us about it, we all rather jumped up and were sort of worried about it; but it was his joke and we all thought it was a lot of fun at the time. So when this bang came, we really didn't get concerned right away ... but then I looked up at Fred ... and Fred had that expression like it wasn't his fault. We suddenly realized that something else had occurred ... but exactly what we didn't know."
It turns out the sound that they heard was the door closing on the mission. There was no recovery from this event. There was no way to compensate. The only thing they could do was use the Lunar Module as a life-raft to drift home. The Lunar Module was designed to touch down on the moon, and fly back to the "safety" of the mother ship, definitely not to support 3 men in the cold recesses of space for an extended period of time. For three days - more precisely 86 hours and 87 minutes - the crew of Apollo 13 with the assistance of the Mission Control team at the Johnson Space Center in Houston worked diligently to return alive. The Lunar Module was designed for two men for 49.5 hours, but three men had to rely on it for nearly 84 hours. They managed to bite and claw their way back to earth, dropping smack into the Pacific Ocean where they were picked up by the Iwo Jima.
Even though the mission was a failure, because they didn't get to land on the moon, it's often called a successful failure because it was amazing in the fact that the astronauts made it home at all, much less alive to tell the tale..
I've been disappointed many times in my life, but I can not fathom the sheer despair felt by these men who got so close to the moon, only to turn away without touching it. Nor can I imagine the relief they must have felt when they took their first breath of air on earth after coming so close to certain death in space.