Apollo 13 Impact

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It was 200,000 miles from Earth, approximately the distance of travelling around the Earth eight times, when Apollo 13’s mission changed from exploring an unknown territory on the moon to immediately trying to return back home. The Apollo operation showed that mission control and the crew itself could work under immense pressure minimal margin of error. In order to understand Apollo 13’s impact on the end of the space race, one must comprehend the events and factors of the Apollo 13 disaster that impacted President Nixon’s decisions on future missions, as well as America’s hardships that affected the flight. In the beginning Apollo 13’s flight was smooth but Mission control were forced to abort the original mission in order to save the crew…show more content…
On both tests done on the oxygen tanks, tank NO.1 performed normally while No.2 did not which resulted in the modification of the second oxygen tank, but because of an oversight in modifying the tank, it resulted in severely damaging the tank itself (“Apollo 13”). The disregarded warning had impacted the flight by aiding in the creation of the major problem, involving oxygen tank NO.2 exploding during the flight to the moon. Similarly, on the final test before the launch tank NO.2 was “damaged from eight hours of overheating, was a potential bomb the next time it was filled with oxygen” (“Apollo 13”). The damaged tank was a major threat to the crew if unnoticed which indeed happened. Both the factors impacted future missions such as Apollo 17 in making sure that mistakes made would not happen again. Moreover, the problems in America that impacted Apollo 13 equally contributes to the end of the space…show more content…
During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Vietnam War and Great Society programs required growing amounts of funding, which came from NASA’s budget ( "Origins of the Space Race.").The country needed more money for different causes and “by landing on the moon, the United States effectively “won” the space race”; space exploration was not a significant priority in the U.S. (“The Space Race”). Also, there was a “growing opposition to the amount of money spent on space exploration by the late 1960s and 1970s,” (“Origins of the Space Race.”).The reason for the growing opposition was that Americans nor longer had interest in space exploration which meant that funding for missions in space such as Apollo 13 or Apollo 17 would be challenging since it no longer had the importance it had in the past. The decline of space enthusiasts hinted the waning of missions to space, foreshadowing the end of the space race. Ironically, the mission seemed to have impacted the president of the United

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