Apollo 13: Gripping account on Netflix of the spacecraft that almost didn’t make it

Apollo 13: Survival provides an edge-of-the-seat take on the experience of three US astronauts who faced disaster unless a rescue plan could quickly be created, writes Esther McCarthy

Apollo 13: Survival: Marilyn Lovell and her family gaze skywards towards their beloved Apollo crew-member. Pictures: Netflix

Just nine months after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, NASA faced the greatest and most urgent crisis in its history. On the night of April 13, 1970, a catastrophic explosion rocked the Apollo 13 spacecraft, leaving three astronauts stranded 200,000 miles from home amid rapidly dwindling oxygen and power supplies.

It prompted astronaut Jack Swigert to say the often misquoted phrase “Houston we’ve had a problem here”, as scientists scrambled against impossible odds to bring the men home, while millions watching throughout the world held their collective breath.

“From the moment of the explosion, there really was very little hope,” says Peter Middleton, director of a gripping new documentary about the mission. “[Mission Commander] Jim Lovell and his crew members, they didn’t say it to each other, but they did feel like their number was up at that time. That’s well documented, and indeed that was being relayed back down to earth.”

Shortly after the accident, news networks put the chances of survival of Lovell, Swigert and their colleague Fred Haise at ten per cent as NASA’s brightest sought solutions. Apollo 13: Survival, an edge-of-your-seat documentary new to Netflix, documents their audacious plan.

Middleton’s feature is an archive-led retelling of the crisis, brought to life with access to the complete audio recordings of the mission, never-before-seen visuals, and interviews with the crew and their families.

“There are lots of oral testimonies and accounts within NASA for people who were working in mission control during that time,” says Middleton. “A large proportion of them also thought that was the end, that this was such a catastrophic system failure aboard the spacecraft. They didn’t train for this kind of multiple systems failure because the chances of survival from it were improbable.

The Apollo 13 craft blasting off.

“As things began to unfold over subsequent hours and days, and certainly once they’d managed to get into their lifeboat — the lunar module - and transfer across that key navigational data so they knew where they were, their odds did begin to improve. With every successive challenge that they faced and overcame, it felt like they were giving themselves a better and better shot at survival. But right up until the entry point, even then, challenges were being thrown at them that they could not make sense of, that the NASA Mission Control could not make sense of, and they didn’t know how badly the explosion would have damaged the heat shields.”

Days later upon seeing it for the first time, even the astronauts and their team were astonished at the massive hole the explosion had blown in the aircraft. It led to real fears that even if they made it all the way back 200,000 miles to home, the module would burn up in the atmosphere as they reentered.

“It just created this incredibly dramatic and stressful scenario for not only the astronauts and the people at NASA and the families,” says Middleton. “Of course, this was being broadcast in full time to the waiting world, the watching world below.”

Regardless of how much audiences know about the outcome of the mission, Apollo 13: Survival’s victory is in its detail as the film reveals both the scale of the logistical challenges the accident brought, and the very real impact it was having on the men and their families.

“Apollo 13 is such an iconic story along with Apollo 11. They’re really the space flights that loom so large in the popular imagination,” says Middleton. “In many ways, Apollo 13 is more dramatic. 200,000 miles from Earth, this explosion, leaving a stranded crew in a stricken spacecraft hemorrhaging oxygen and power in this improbable rescue mission.

“But in early development, it became apparent to us that not everyone is so familiar with the story. A lot of people are aware of the flight, but what actually unfolded across those three days has become a little bit hazy over the years.

“Of course, people are very familiar with the Ron Howard film from 1995, but it’s interesting that more time has elapsed between the release of that film and now than elapsed between the mission and that production,” he adds.

Mission Control at NASA’s centre in Houston

The filmmaking team nevertheless sought new angles and approaches in telling the story, trawling through archival records and materials and examining them anew.

They had access for the first time to about 7,000 hours of audio which had only recently been untangled and remastered by a group of space enthusiasts who discovered the material in the US National Archives. But Middleton also wanted to focus on the emotional heart of the film. In doing so, they reached out to Jim Lovell, his wife Marilyn and his family.

“One of the key sources of material for us was the family,” says Middleton. “We took our time reaching out to them. We were aware that over the course of
50 years, they’d had a lot of approaches for documentaries, for radio programmes and press. We wanted to make sure that we had our project in shape and had a clear proposal as to what we were trying to achieve.

“Because we were interested in framing it from Jim and Marilyn’s perspective and framing it through their relationship, we wanted to make sure that they felt confident that we were the right filmmaking team to achieve that.”

The filmmakers approached the family before the editing process. It paid off. “They were very receptive, and we went out there and spent time with the family, and they were very generous in sharing their materials with us.

“They opened up the personal archives, in effect, hundreds and hundreds of photographs, dozens of hours of eight millimetre footage that hadn’t been seen before from that period of their lives, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and that really enriched the project. Without that, I’m not sure we would have quite been able to achieve what we were hoping to in framing it through the experience of the family.”

• Apollo 13: Survival is now on Netflix

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