Odyssey of Apollo 13 Became NASA’s ‘Successful Failure’

The Cold Flight Around the Moon

As Aquarius housed the three astronauts, cold temperatures inside the cabin dropped down to nearly 35 degrees F. The spacecraft was running on only a few amps to run the computer and communications.

“We did not have adequate clothing to handle that situation. We did put on every pair of underwear we had in the vehicle,” Haise noted. “Jim Lovell and I wore our lunar boots, the boots we would normally put over our spacesuit boots on the lunar surface.”

There was little for the freezing astronauts to due except for course corrections and to look out the window. The timeline allowed for the crew to observe and photograph as they rounded the backside of the Moon.

Haise and Swigert studied and commented on the lunar geography, including their intended landing site at Fra Mauro. Lovell, who had flown in lunar orbit in December 1968, carried a feeling of disappointment for not landing.

“Probably the best high point was to view the Moon as we went by, which is quite a different variety body than the Earth, and to get to see the backside, which is quite different from the front,” Haise recalled. “Mountainous, very hilly, only a very few small mares or seas, the so-called smooth areas. And that was exciting. Jack Swigert and I both had cameras out and shot quite a number of pictures while we passed by briefly.”
It was on the backside of the Moon that Apollo 13’s crew set a record not yet broken for the furthest human distance from Earth. The flight’s free return trajectory caused them to travel 60 miles further from the lunar far side than past crewed flights. The record is a distance of 248,577 miles from Earth.

As they lost communications with mission control on the backside, Lovell pulled the rookies away from the windows. It was time to prepare for a critical engine burn by the lunar module’s descent stage.

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