Astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise splashed down safely in the South Pacific, capping a dramatic rescue after an oxygen tank explosion crippled their spacecraft en route to the Moon on April 13. Mission Control's improvised fixes, including a makeshift CO2 scrubber built from spare parts, turned a near-catastrophe into one of NASA's most celebrated achievements.
Four days earlier, 'Houston, we've had a problem' had become the understatement of the space age. An oxygen tank in the Apollo 13 service module had exploded, crippling the main spacecraft and forcing the three astronauts to abandon the lunar landing and retreat into the tiny lunar module, using it as a lifeboat for a journey it was never designed to sustain.
Engineers on the ground worked around the clock, devising a way to fit square carbon dioxide scrubbers from the command module into the lunar module's round receptacles using nothing but plastic bags, cardboard, and duct tape. Astronauts were rationed to six ounces of water a day each and endured temperatures near freezing as power was cut to conserve battery life for reentry.
On April 17, the crew jettisoned the damaged service module, finally seeing the full extent of the explosion damage, then the lunar module itself, before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near American Samoa, watched by a global television audience. All three astronauts survived. The mission, technically a failure in its stated goal of landing on the Moon, became legendary as a triumph of improvisation and became known, in the words later popularized by the 1995 film, as 'a successful failure.'