April 11, 1970. At 2:13 PM, EST, three astronauts, namely commander James “Jim” Lovell, command module pilot John “Jack” Swigert, and lunar module pilot Fred Haise, took off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Their destination: the Moon. Everything was going fine (or at least, it seemed), when, fifty-six hours after the launch, something went wrong.
The crew, who had just finished a television broadcast from aboard the command module, nicknamed Odyssey, noticed a slight drop in cabin pressure. Swigert went to see what was going on and check on the service module's oxygen tanks.
The crew heard a loud bang coming from outside and Swigert uttered the famous line: "Okay Houston, we've had a problem here."
After the bang, everything quickly went downhill.
The tank explosion was so intense that it blasted off a chunk of the service module. As a result of this explosion, power and oxygen quickly started to drop and, all of a sudden, things were a matter of life or death.
With this happening, the astronauts, as well as the NASA ground crew below, immediately realized that there’s no chance for them to go to the Moon — they had to go back. But getting them back would prove to be really difficult.
Thanks to the efforts of both the astronauts and the ground team, the three people were able to come back in one piece.
This event went down in history as NASA’s “successful failure”. While the mission to go to the Moon clearly failed, the mission to bring these astronauts home clearly didn't.
Learn more about this significant event in space history over at Live Science.
(Image Credit: NASA/ Wikimedia Commons)