Apollo 13. The unluckiest space flight not on a space shuttle. Three astronauts who are on a spaceship (Aquarius), have a major malfunction on their original, simple, moon flight. About ten minutes after liftoff, an engine bursts, doing nothing, but that will later endanger the astronauts. When Houston (command center) tells one of the astronauts to stir the oxygen tanks, a side panel bursts and all of a sudden the astronauts are losing all their life support. Not only are their life supports gone, but they have hardly any energy and can’t see the Earth. To make matters even worse, one of the astronauts gets very sick, and is too weak to do much. It looked like to me that 13 is truly an unlucky number.
While the astronauts are not only out of energy, the carbon dioxide levels are increasing majorly. Just seconds before blackout, the astronauts create a replacement filter for the one that was destroyed. One thing that I find amazing is that the sick astronaut ripped the bag, so the others had to use a SOCK to fix it. Houston finds a way to get back to Earth by using the moon’s gravity to hurl them back towards Earth. While this works, they encounter ANOTHER challenge. Since the engines were very powerful, the spaceship was hurtling in all different directions. Finally, with three seconds till energy ran out, the pilot managed to get in the exact position.
But this wasn’t easy. Imagine the Earth as a basketball and the Moon as a softball. The spaceship would have to hit a section of the earth no wider than a piece of paper just to get in the atmosphere, and they would have to hit a place on the Earth less than the size of a pinhead (not the real Earth, but the basketball). The final incredible thing is that the spaceship didn’t hit the water until after 2 minutes than the average time. Nobody has reentered that slow ever.
