'Houston, we've had a problem': Remembering Apollo 13 at 50

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 moonshot, 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.

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

Lovell calls it 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 Center 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 next Monday, 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.

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 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) 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 spaceflight - 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.'