Houston, We Have a Problem

Last month was the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 13 crisis, in which three American astronauts almost died when an explosion crippled their spacecraft three-quarters of the way to the moon. Bringing the crew back home alive required the efforts of thousands back on the ground in NASA's mission control centers.

Although many people are familiar with the Apollo 13 mission thanks to the 1995 movie of the same name, a 2-hour dramatization necessarily condenses and fictionalizes many elements of the epic four-day engineering struggle to keep the crew alive. So in honor of this anniversary, IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Stephen Cass interviewed key flight controllers and drew on hours of audio recorded from mission control during the crisis. He's been able to separate the facts from the fiction and uncover aspects of the story that are little known—even to the participants. This special report is now available on Spectrum Online at "http://www.spectrum.ieee.org