Inside Apollo 13: Enhanced photos reveal life on ill-fated space mission

Focus: One Giant Leap, 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing. Video / NASA

Apollo 13′s astronauts never gave a thought to their mission number as they blasted off for the moon 50 years ago. Even when their oxygen tank ruptured two days later — on April 13.

Jim Lovell and Fred Haise insist they're not superstitious. They even use 13 in their email addresses.

As mission commander Lovell sees it, he's incredibly lucky. Not only did he survive Nasa's most harrowing moon shot, he's around to mark its golden anniversary.

"I'm still alive. As long as I can keep breathing, I'm good," Lovell, 92, said in an interview with The Associated Press from his Lake Forest, Illinois, home.

Jim Lovell, left, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise sit together in the command module as they prepare for re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. Photo / Nasa, Andy Saunders

A half-century later, Apollo 13 is still considered Mission Control's finest hour.

And now imaging specialist Andy Saunders has enhanced a series of photos revealing what it was like on board the perilous space mission.

Andy Saunders created images from low-quality 16mm film shot by the crew using a technique known as "stacking". Before and after of Fred Haise taking a nap. Photo / Nasa, Andy Saunders

Using a technique called "stacking", he used images shot from the crew's original 16mm film footage and layered them on top of one other to sharpen the photos.

"One striking thing about the 16mm footage is how calm the crew appear, given the grave nature of the situation, the conditions, and the critical mission tasks that lay ahead," Saunders told BBC News.

"This perhaps belies their true feelings as we know that, in reality, the crew doubted if they would make it home alive."

In fact Lovell calls the mission "a miraculous recovery."

Haise, like so many others, regards it as Nasa's most successful failure.

"It was a great mission," Haise, 86, said. It showed "what can be done if people use their minds and a little ingenuity."

As the lunar module pilot, Haise would have become the sixth man to walk on the moon, following Lovell onto the dusty gray surface. The oxygen tank explosion robbed them of the moon landing, which would have been Nasa's third, nine months after Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humanity's first footsteps on the moon.

Now the coronavirus pandemic has robbed them of their anniversary celebrations. Festivities are on hold, including at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, where the mission began on April 11, 1970, a Saturday just like this year.

That won't stop Haise, who still lives in Houston, from marking what he calls "boom day" today, as he does every April 13.

Lovell, Haise and Jack Swigert, a last-minute fill-in who died in 1982, were almost to the moon when they heard a bang and felt a shudder. One of two oxygen tanks had burst in the spacecraft's service module.

The tense words that followed are the stuff of space — and movie — fame.

"OK, Houston, we've had a problem here," radioed Swigert, the command module pilot.

"This is Houston. Say again, please."

"Houston, we've had a problem," Lovell cut in.

Jack Swigert and Jim Lovell with a good view of the lunar module's control panel. Photo / Nasa, Andy Saunders

Lovell reported a sudden voltage drop in one of the two main electrical circuits. Within seconds, Houston's Mission Control saw pressure readings for the damaged oxygen tank plunge to zero. The blast also knocked out two electrical power-generating fuel cells and damaged the third.

As Lovell peered out the window and saw oxygen escaping into the black void, he knew his moon landing was also slipping away. He shoved all emotions aside.

"Not landing on the moon or dying in space are two different things," Lovell explained, "and so we forgot about landing on the moon. This was one of survival. How do we get home?"

The astronauts were 322,000km from Earth. Getting back alive would require calm, skill and, yes, luck.

"The explosion could not have happened at a better time," Lovell said.

Much earlier, he said, and the astronauts wouldn't have had enough electrical power to make it around the moon and slingshot back to Earth for a splashdown. A blast in lunar orbit or, worse still, while Lovell and Haise were on the surface, "that would be the end of it."

"I think we had some divine help in this flight," Lovell said.

The aborted mission went from being so humdrum that none of the major TV networks broadcast the astronauts' show-and-tell minutes before the explosion, to a life-and-death drama gripping the entire world.

As flight director Gene Kranz and his team in Houston raced to come up with a rescue plan, the astronauts kept their cool. It was Lovell's fourth space flight - his second to the moon - and the first and only one for Haise and Swigert.

Dark thoughts "always raced through our minds, but silently. We didn't talk about that," Lovell said.

Added Haise: "We never hit the point where there was nothing left to do. So, no, we never got to a point where we said, 'Well, we're going to die.'"

The White House, less confident, demanded odds. Kranz refused, leaving it to others to put the crew's chances at 50-50. In his mind, there was no doubt, no room for failure — only success.

"Basically that was the name of the game: I'm going to get them home. My team's going to get them home. We will get them home," Kranz recalled.

The flight controllers went into crisis mode. They immediately ordered the command module Odyssey shut down to conserve what little power remained, and the astronauts to move into the lunar module Aquarius, now a lifeboat.

A moment of levity amid the crisis: Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert (centre) appear in good spirits. Photo / Nasa, Andy Saunders

One of the low points, Lovell said, was realising they'd be cramped together in the lander.

"It was designed for two people for two days. We were three people for four days."

The carbon dioxide overload, from breathing, threatened to kill them.

Engineers scrambled to figure out how to convert the square air-purifying canisters in the dead capsule into round ones that would fit in their temporary home.

Their outside-the-box, seat-of-the-pants solution, using spacecraft scraps, worked. But it was so damp and cold that the astronauts couldn't sleep. Condensation covered the walls and windows, and the temperature was close to freezing.

Dehydrated and feverish, Haise had the roughest time during the six-day ordeal. Despite the sky-high stress, Haise recalls no cross words among the three test pilots. Even Swigert fit in, despite joining the crew a scant three days before liftoff. He replaced command module pilot Ken Mattingly, who with his crewmates had been exposed to German measles, but unlike them didn't have immunity.

Rumours swirled that the astronauts had poison pills tucked away in case of a hopeless situation. Lovell dispelled that notion on page one of his 1994 autobiography, Lost Moon, the basis for the Apollo 13 film.

Splashdown day finally arrived April 17, 1970 — with no guarantees.

The astronauts managed to power up their command module, avoiding short circuits but creating a rainfall inside as the spacecraft decelerated in the atmosphere.

The communication blackout lasted 1 1/2 minutes longer than normal. Controllers grew alarmed. Finally, three billowing parachutes appeared above the Pacific. It was only then, Lovell said, that "we knew that we had it made".

The astronauts had no idea how much their cosmic cliffhanger impacted the world until they reached Honolulu. President Richard Nixon was there to greet them.

The dark, powered-down command module. Fred Haise went to check it before they moved back in from their lunar module "lifeboat" for the final perilous stage. Photo / Nasa, Andy Saunders

"We never dreamed a billion people were following us on television and radio, and reading about us in banner headlines of every newspaper published," Lovell noted in a Nasa history document.

The tank explosion later was linked to damage caused by electrical overheating in ground tests.

Apollo 13 "showed teamwork, camaraderie and what Nasa was really made of," said Columbia University's Mike Massimino, a former shuttle astronaut.

In the decades since, Lovell and his wife, Marilyn, of nearly 68 years have discussed the what-ifs and might-have-beens.

"The outcome of everything is, naturally, that he's alive," she said, "and that we've had all these years."

A one-liner made in Hollywood

Apollo 13′s best known quotes originated not in space or Mission Control, but in Hollywood.

Their moon-bound spacecraft wrecked by an oxygen tank explosion on April 13, 1970, the astronauts urgently radioed, "Houston, we've had a problem here."

Screenwriters for the 1995 film Apollo 13 wanted to punch that up. Thus was born "Houston, we have a problem."

Even more artistic license was taken with Nasa flight director Gene Kranz' mobilising speech to his team in Houston.

Kranz never declared, "Failure is not an option."

Ask Kranz what he actually told flight controllers, and he rattles it off without a moment's hesitation a half-century later.

"I have never lost an American in space, sure as hell aren't going to lose one now. This crew is coming home. You got to believe it. Your team must believe it. And we must make it happen."

Kranz said the moviemakers came up with "Failure is not an option."

Does he wish he'd said it? "No — I'm satisfied with what I said."

Kranz constantly finds himself setting the record straight — "in fact, every time I speak".

"I try not to plagiarise," he said with a laugh.

He did borrow the phrase for the title of his 2000 autobiography.

Director Ron Howard's film starring Ed Harris as Kranz and Tom Hanks as mission commander Jim Lovell was based on Lovell's 1994 autobiography, Lost Moon. Actors Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon portrayed Apollo 13 astronauts Fred Haise and Jack Swigert.

-AP