Based on the true story of Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise (also Ken Mattingly and Gene Kranz). This is definitely a piece of cinematic history. One of the best movies ever made. I LOVE true stories. Let me take a second to count the number of true story movies I have... counting... please wait... I have 19 movies that are true stories or are based on actual events.
Anyway, back to Apollo 13. The story is that of the aforementioned astronauts. The group of Lovell, Haise and Mattingly were scheduled to be on the Apollo 14 project, but they got bumped up and had the opportunity to go much sooner than they anticipated, on the Apollo 13 launch. They trained tirelessly to get everything perfectly right, and were crazy excited about going into space and getting to walk on the moon. Three days before launch, Mattingly is exposed to German Measles and the doctors advise Lovell to take him off the flight crew as to keep the other astronauts well while in space. He makes the difficult decision to leave Mattingly behind, and calls upon his replacement on the back up team, Jack Swigert. He has 2 days to get trained up to the level Lovell and Haise are at. He has been practicing, but not as hard as the Prime team.
The rocket launches, and under an hour after take off, the middle of 5 engines goes off 2 minutes earlier than it was supposed to. This problem is easily remedied by simply firing the other 4 engines for longer. Tom Hanks, playing Lovell, turns to his crew, and laughingly says, "Guess we just had our glitch of this mission."
The rocket has now joined the Landing Module or LM, and the crew has done a broadcast down to earth from inside the Module. Shortly after finishing the broadcast, flight control, led by Gene Kranz, has Swigert go over a few "housekeeping" items. They ask him to roll the rocket a little this way and that, to do this thing and that thing, and then they ask him to stir the O2 canisters to equalize the pressure. He does so, but when he does, the crew hears a loud bang, and debris flies off the rocket into the vacuum of space. Initially the astronauts think they've been struck by a meteor, but upon further examination, they find that one of their O2 tanks has exploded, and was now expelling half of their supply of oxygen into space.
Mission control decides to abort the mission and have them turn around and come back. Due to damage from the explosion they have limited power and, one would assume they had limited oxygen. This was not the case however. They had plenty of oxygen, but the more they breathed, the more Carbon Dioxide they exhaled into the rocket, slowly poisoning each other and themselves. Mission control commands the astronauts to go into the LM, since it's smaller, they can use their body heat to keep themselves a little warmer when they need to turn the heat off. However, they need to come up with a few plans to make filters so they're breathing oxygen, and they need to come up with some ways to conserve the remaining power to make the trip back home safely.
Mission control calls upon Mattingly, who, measle free, comes in and hops into the flight simulator and does all he can think of to do what needs to be done to get them home without exceeding the remaining power. He can't go over 20 amps, so it's a challenge. But he eventually comes up with a plan for the power saving and power using. People from NASA also come up with a way to convert they crew's square filter to fit into the round casing, thus allowing them to breathe oxygen again.
The crew makes it home safely, and the movie is over.
There were 2 big ideas that I took from this movie.
1. It reminded me once again how in control of everything God is. If Mattingly hadn't been exposed to measles, then he would've been up on the Odyssey, and would not have been able to experiment with the power plans. And had he actually come down with the measles, he would not have been in the right mind to come up with such ingenious plans. God knows what he's doing, even if it doesn't seem like it at the time.
2. At one point in the movie the news is showing some old footage of each member of the crew. During an interview of Lovell, he tells of how one night when he was in war, all the power in his plane's cockpit went out. He wasn't able to use his radio either, because enemy ships were using the same frequency and they would be able to pick it up. But because it was so dark outside and so dark in the cabin, Jim was able to look down at the water and see bio-luminescent algae, glowing green in the total darkness. Lovell knew that that kind of algae glowed when it was churned up by large ships. All he had to do was follow the trail of glowing green to the aircraft carrier. He said it was like lights pointing him home. Sometimes things in our lives make it seem like it's pitch black in the middle of enemy territory. We can't see anything or any way out of it. We begin to panic! What we need to do is remember where we're going, and to look to God, as he will always be there, shining through our darkest times, leading us home. And sometimes it takes the darkest night to see the brightest light.
Next week: Armageddon. Another space movie, much less true =P
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