54 years since Apollo 13 'Houston, we have a problem'

April 12 () –

It was April 13, 1970, 54 years ago, when the Apollo 13 mission recorded an anomaly during its return trip to the Moon. which ended up becoming a real space odyssey.

Two days after liftoff, at 9:08 p.m., astronaut Jack Swigert contacted mission control in Houston to say “Well, Houston, we've had a problem here,” just after noticing a warning light on the dashboard. control of the ship, accompanied by a bang, which turned out to be the explosion of the oxygen tanks in the service module. The image shows the damage, observed after the separation of the command module.

From Houston, the response was “Houston here. Please repeat.” Then, the mission commander, Jim Lovell, repeated. “Hey, Houston, we've had a problem.” “We have a voltage drop on MAIN BUS B,” he added. “Understood, power drop on the MAIN BUS B,” she responded from Earth. “Well, wait Thirteen, we're checking it,” she added.

Meanwhile, a large number of warning lights came on in series indicating the loss of two of the three power generating sources, Wikipedia reports.

As a result, NASA was forced to abandon its plans to carry out the third manned moon landing. The destroyed tanks provided life support to the astronauts, so the new challenge was to return them safely to Earth.

The rescue plan consisted of use the Aquarius lunar module as a lifeboat and in taking advantage of the inertia of passing through the lunar orbit to achieve speed and be able to reach the Earth. The failure of the lunar mission ended up being a success in space history by getting the three astronauts back to Earth alive.

Since then, the phrase 'Houston, we have a problem' has become popular, being used to informally account for the emergence of an unforeseen problem.