Every time Jim Lovell looks at the moon, he feels cheated.
Twenty-five years ago this week, the Apollo 13 commander was supposed to land there. Instead, he wound up zooming around it in a race for his life after an oxygen tank in the spaceship exploded 200,000 miles from Earth, four-fifths of the way to the moon.Lovell and his crew, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, did return safely to Earth. Lovell is grateful for that. But it was the second time he flew to the moon and didn't land.
"That is my one regret," said Lovell, 67.
Lovell first circled the moon in 1968 on Apollo 8, a dress rehearsal for the first manned lunar landing the following year. During Apollo 13, he should have become the fifth man to walk on the moon and Haise the sixth; Swigert was going to wait for them as they explored the Fra Mauro highlands.
It never happened.
"On the other hand, the mission itself and the fact that we triumphed over an almost certain catastrophe does give me a deep sense of satisfaction. Although I didn't land on the moon, the achievement that was accomplished, I thought, was well worthwhile to participate in," Lovell said recently.
Many consider Apollo 13's safe return one of NASA's finest moments, right up there with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's stroll on the moon nine months earlier on Apollo 11.
"Looking at it in retrospect, I think it's probably one of the most amazing and incredible rescues of all history," said Gene Kranz, its lead flight director. "The performance of the crew and the operations team and the support of the whole world, they just came together in a marvelous moment of achievement."
The high drama didn't escape Hollywood: unlucky, yet ultimately lucky, Apollo 13.
Director Ron Howard's film "Apollo 13," based on Lovell's 1994 book "Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13," will be released in June. Two-time Academy Award winner Tom Hanks stars as Lovell.
The date of the tank explosion: April 13, 1970, two days after the colossal Saturn 5 rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Center.
The time of the launch: 2:13 p.m. at Kennedy and 1:13 p.m. at Mission Control in Houston, or 13:13 in military time.
Cursed or not, it remains NASA's only in-space disaster in 99 human space flights.
The Apollo 1 spacecraft fire, which killed three astronauts in 1967, occurred at the launch pad during a countdown test. The Challenger explosion, which killed all seven aboard in 1986, occurred 73 seconds after liftoff.
NASA later concluded both those tragedies could have been avoided.
Apollo 13 also could have been prevented: A review board criticized NASA afterward for "serious oversight" in the design and testing of the oxygen tank.
Men returned to the moon four more times and landed. But none of the Apollo 13 astronauts flew in space again.