Hi,

Apollo 13 popped up on Sky here in the UK this week, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as always, but it just got me thinking.

Knowing how Hollywood likes to exercise artistic licence with these docu-pics, I am sure a certain amount of things have been altered slightly, merged (they love to do that with characters) etc., so how accurately does it reflect what actually happened on A13?

Cheers,

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Dave

Anyone seen my marbles? Anyone ... ?

http://www.moviemistakes.com/film75
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112384/goofs

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

You could also get it from the "horse's mouth", as it were. The more recent releases of Apollo 13 have a fascinating commentary track by Jim and Marilyn Lovell. They're very good about pointing out the relatively few instances of artistic license vs the effort that went into keeping the film as authentic as possible.

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. o O ( "Quote that 'Blazing Saddles' scene at Mike, and the BAUTer gets it! " )

Cool. That sounds like a must-have feature to me. Cheers.

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Dave

Anyone seen my marbles? Anyone ... ?

The main ones that occur to me are:

- According to Lovell, there was no argument involving Haise blaming Swigert for not checking the tanks before stirring them.

- Mission Control knew early on that they needed to do something about the CO2 levels in the spacecraft. It wasn't a matter of, "Uh oh, look, the CO2 is getting up to a dangerous level, what ever shall we do?" as it's depicted in the movie.

- I seriously doubt that the manual trajectory correction burn late in the movie was quite as chaotic as depicted.

Some critics have claimed that Marilyn Lovell's losing her wedding ring was over-egging the pudding, but that actually did occur. (I believe she got it back, though.)

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Well, that and they're pointed in the wrong direction. Since they were trying to slow down (i.e. perform a braking maneuver to steepen their atmospheric re-entry angle), the engine nozzle should have been pointing towards the Earth (which, incidentally, would have been the only way to see the Earth through the landing cross-hairs). Hollywood special effects types really hate to show rockets thrusting against their direction-of-motion (unless the rocket is obviously landing). I guess they feel "it doesn't look right."

On the whole, This movie got so many things right that I forgave a lot of their artistic licence.

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

I wish I could remember where I read it (interview with Lovell somewhere, maybe?), but I believe it was a matter of "well, it wasn't really that wild, but it *felt* like it to us!" The crew were fairly sensitive to that sort of thing and also knew how bad it would be to end up even a little off, but the audience didn't have that understanding. So they hammed it up a bit.

The scene of the construction of the CO2 removal canister adapter is not accurate at all. Here's the real story. Start at page 26.

All the mistakes in Apollo 13 are just more nails in the coffin for those who think NASA landed men on the Moon. I mean, if Hollywood couldn't even get the details right in a movie about men NOT landing on the Moon, how could NASA be expected to get all the details right to enable an actual landing?

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This scene did have a nice spin-off: British television producer Cathy Rogers got the idea for "Scrapheap Showdown" (known as "Junkyard Wars" on America's Learning Channel) directly from that part of the movie:

"She came up with the idea for Junkyard Wars with a fellow producer after seeing Apollo 13. "When the engineers dump that huge box of rubbish to try and fix the carbon-monoxide filters (sic), I could just feel the tension building in the theater. A mechanical competition like Junkyard Wars captures that same sort of thing, combining that boyish obsession with machines with the thrill of competition." "

I've always enjoyed that show (even if their junkyard is very liberally seeded).

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

Har, like the perfectly good propellers they found in the supposed 'junkyard'? Whoda thunk it?

I don't really care for the show. Bring me some battling robot goodness.

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You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

The movie made it appear that the astronauts were to clueless to build the adapter without detailed instructions from the ground...

I know (and they could have done the explanation with a simple satement) that the CO2 scubber was too important to mess up--it had to work right the first time because they had very limited supplies to work with, and a short timeline t work against....

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"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

Well, the true story probably would not have fit into the film, so I don't have a problem with the compression of the event for dramatic purposes.

Kizarvexis

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"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll

Actually, the window they looked out of DID look "down" from a Luar landing point of view. It was the window they would have used to see the Lunar surface as they were touching down. It would have to point in the same basic direction as the engine cone. So they were properly oriented.

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It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker

The interior scenes (i.e. looking out the window) were correct, but the exterior shots clearly showed the nozzle - and those same windows - pointed away from the Earth.

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

Last week I managed to buy a video copy of the film for just 99p

However it did not have the extra that the first copy I looked at, which I had borrowed. This extra was an interview with Lovell and the film makers.

IIRC he said that since Apollo 13, no space mission has ever had a mission 13 on it. (If so what happened on the 13th mission of the space shuttle)

I have some questions concerning Apollo 13


It must have been really something for the Woo Woos at the time to shout about. Was there any disquiet in NASA about the confluences of 13 occuring during the missions, even if only to shut the woo-woo nay sayers up. How much grief did NASA get from the media prior to the mission.

Was Marilynn Lovell really superstitious. Was the loss of the wedding ring seen as a bad omen.

So how did such a duff system that caused all this get past QA, what was the verdict of the inquiry and did anyone get to carry the can for this.

Are NASA medical directors that paranoid, would someone today get bumped if they had been in contact with someone who later develops the Measals.

Well that is it for now, save that on the second viewing I got more caught up in the emotions at the end than the first time I saw it. Is this because we have been discussing it so much here?

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

After STS-9, NASA adopted a different numbering system (for a few years and then reverted back to sequential).

Wikipedia: List of Space Shuttle Missions

1 April 12 1981 STS-1
2 November 12 1981 STS-2
3 March 22 1982 STS-3
4 June 27 1982 STS-4
5 November 11 1982 STS-5
6 April 4 1983 STS-6
7 June 18 1983 STS-7
8 August 30 1983 STS-8
9 November 28 1983 STS-9
10 February 3 1984 STS-41-B
11 April 6 1984 STS-41-C
12 August 30 1984 STS-41-D
13 October 5 1984 STS-41-G

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

For completeness sake. It goes the last digit of the fiscal year, the launch site (1 for KSC, 2 for Vandenburg AFB). The letter is what launch it is that year.

They stopped that practice after STS-51L

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Yes, she says it had never come off before and that she had always worn in it the shower. When it just suddenly slipped off she was shocked and had the feeling that something dreadful was coming.