Skip to main content

Mark 50th anniversary of Apollo 13 launch by reliving events in real time

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13, one of the most dramatic missions in the history of space flight. Launched from the Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970, the mission was intended to carry three astronauts to the moon. But two days into the mission, an oxygen tank on board the spacecraft failed and caused an explosion, venting much of the available oxygen into space. The world watched as mission control scrambled to find a way to extend the small amount of available oxygen to keep the astronauts alive for four days until the craft was able to splashdown in the South Pacific Ocean.

The mission has become renowned as “a successful failure” as even though it went terribly wrong, the crew were saved, and it renewed the public’s interest in space exploration with tens of millions of people watching the splashdown.

“Our goal 50 years ago was to save our valiant crew after sending them around the moon and return them safely to Earth,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. “Our goal now is to return to the moon to stay, in a sustainable way. We are working hard to ensure that we don’t need to respond to this kind of emergency in Artemis, but to be ready to respond to any problems we don’t anticipate.”

The crewmembers of the Apollo 13 mission
The crewmembers of the Apollo 13 mission step aboard the USS Iwo Jima, prime recovery ship for the mission, following splashdown and recovery operations in the South Pacific Ocean. Exiting the helicopter that made the pick-up some four miles from the Iwo Jima are (from left) Fred W. Haise Jr., lunar module pilot; James A. Lovell Jr., commander; and John L. Swigert Jr., command module pilot. The crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft splashed down at 12:07:44 p.m. (CST), April 17, 1970. NASA

In commemoration of the mission’s launch, NASA has created the Apollo 13 in Real Time website, where visitors can experience the launch as it happened, based on historical materials and timed exactly as it occurred fifty years ago. The materials include footage of mission control, the film shot by the astronauts, and television broadcasts from the time, along with photographs and voice recordings, all synced up to their correct place in the timeline.

“This project includes newly digitized and restored mission control audio,” the website says. “The last tapes of these recordings were discovered in the National Archives fall of 2019 and were digitized in February, 2020 and contain the time surrounding the onboard explosion. These recordings haven’t been heard since the accident investigation in 1970.”

Editors' Recommendations

Georgina Torbet
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more