Apollo 13 Research Paper

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Apollo 13 “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” (Apollo 13) is a recognizable expression that many of us may know but what exactly happened that had NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, on the edge of their seats? There has been a sufficient amount of attempts to land on the Earth’s Moon, however this specific mission left the United States astounded by this “successful failure” (Apollo 13). Apollo 11 was the first spaceflight that landed two men on the moon and Apollo 12 was triumphant as well, Apollo 13, however did not go as planned even though the spacecraft was built the exact same way as Apollo 12’s ship (“Apollo 13 Mission”). Its mission ended due to ship failure when an oxygen tank exploded that had the astronauts pass the Moon without entering orbit and returned to…show more content…
Humanity agrees with practice makes perfect or as Forbes says it, “experience takes experience,” (Loftus). Astronauts are not any different. There is no substitute for hours of actually doing something and it can probably prevent some form of disaster. Those who worked for NASA had been in the lunar-landing business for approximately nine years when the detonation happened on the Apollo 13. Just before the scheduled launch, Ken Mattingly, command module pilot, was removed from the mission and replace with Jack Swigert, back-up CM Pilot, due to, “exposure of German measles” (Dunbar). Before Mattingly was replaced, he spent hours in training with his crew to get things right. When the spacecraft was in trouble, Mattingly was called in for his solutions. Because of his grand knowledge about the command module, he was extremely involved in helping the ground team solve the problem of power conservation during re-entry. Although some had not experienced an explosion, it shows that there are things you cannot experience until it happens but that is what training is good for, to

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