Captain Jim Lovell, Apollo 13 commander.

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1:20Hello, I'm Kevin Fong and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. There have been so many disagreements between me and my family. Putting on a show, that is what it means to be Lady Gaga. Only the things that you can't solve with government and private sector is where you bring philanthropy in. There's no place in the world where women are equal. Every generation, every generation has to fight to maintain democracy. This interview is slightly different. It's one I did years ago for the BBC World Service podcast, 13 Minutes to the Moon, which is about epic space stories.

2:07It was with Captain Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, a spacecraft which, in the year 1970, had been on its way to the moon when there was an explosion. The mission almost ended in disaster, but the crew survived and made it back to Earth. You may have seen Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell in the Apollo 13 movie. Well, Jim died earlier this month at the age of 97, so he wanted to give you a chance to hear some of the interview he gave to me. He spoke about what happened all those years ago, from the shocking moment of the explosion to the enormous relief of splashdown. He shared the story of the lunar landmark he named in honour of his wife and reflected on survival, the global impact of Apollo 13, and what it meant to finally come back to Earth.

3:00It's a tale of two groups. One group in a comfortable control room, fortified by hot coffee and cigarettes, that had to make quick and correct decisions. also having a whole industry complex behind them. The other group had a cold, damp, crippled spacecraft 200 ,000 miles from Earth who had to correctly do those decisions made by the ground and control the spacecraft to do the job. We were cold. We were kind of exhausted. But you'd be surprised how long you can last if you're in deep trouble without a deep sleep.

3:48Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Captain Jim Lovell in a conversation first broadcast in April 2020. You're going to hear his story just before the explosion happens, two days and eight hours after liftoff. We had just finished. Hayes was still in the spacecraft. I was taking the camera back down to the command module when suddenly there was a big bang. Now, in the past, Fred liked to have a little joke. And there was a switch that if you threw it, it was an oxygen tank thing, would go just bang. And he'd love to do that because that was his idea. It scared Jack and I, what happened to you?

4:40And so immediately on my way down into the command module, I heard this. I thought that Hayes was playing games again. And I looked up, and the expression on Hayes' face was entirely different. He had no idea what was going on. Then I looked at Swiker. Swiker's eyes were as wide as saucers. Neither did he have any idea what was going on. But it didn't take long for us to get down in the command module, or me to get down. when I saw that two out of the three of the fuel cells have died. That worried me. And there was a sequence of events after that, one by one, mainly the one when I looked out the side window and saw escaping at a high rate of speed, a gaseous substance out into the vacuum, which was like a hose going out, that I knew we were in deep, deep trouble.

5:34You've heard a bang. You float into the command module. What is it that you see around you immediately that makes you realize that something's not right? Well, what you see, first of all, is a red light. Because the red light said, hey, there's something wrong with your fuel cells. And so then you go look at the fuel cells and you look at the gauges and two of them are not operating. That gives you a little bit of a start. and then you look around and your eyes happen to focus on the gauges that show you the quantity of the oxygen tanks and one of them reads zero. Now that really gives you a start but you want to double check something so for some reason which I can't tell you now I looked out the window and that told me the answer and from that on it was one of survival.

6:24What was this venting doing to the attitude of the vehicle and the motions of the vehicle? Was it stable? Was it rocking around? What was happening? Well, the explosion caused the vehicle, it was a pretty big bang, which eventually we know blew off part of the spacecraft. And so we got back on the controls trying to control it. Well, we still had attitude control in the command module, and it took some time to get it under control, but we did. We got it under control. There's this sort of gap in realization, isn't there? You on the vehicle know almost immediately that you're in trouble, whereas it takes the ground a little while to catch up.

7:03That's right. They couldn't believe it at first because, you know, multiple failures don't really occur like that. But we knew what the story was. When they said, Houston, we have a problem here, we were understating the situation. I've often wondered about that phrase, Houston, we've had a problem. it's a pretty low-key description for what is a potentially catastrophic event. Did you deliberately choose those words? Why did you couch it that way? Well, that's exactly what it was. We had a problem. We didn't know how serious it was, and we didn't know what the problem was. That's the other thing.

7:45When that sentence was said, we didn't know how much oxygen was escaping from the spacecraft. We thought it was an electrical problem. We thought that we lost two fuel cells, and we still had one. And one fuel cell, believe it or not, would have given us enough electrical power to get around the moon and just get back home safely. But when we lost all electrical power, there was nothing we could do. It got to be, over a period of time, more and more serious. Now, your first thought, you've lost your electrical power. you realize that at that point the mission to land on the moon is over. What are your thoughts at that point?

8:27Our first thoughts there were just what do we do, how do we do to get home? I think the idea of using the lunar module probably occurred to ground control and to the crew at the safe time. That idea of using the lunar module as a vehicle to get home when something happened had been thought of before, but not in the context of the way the explosion occurred. What was your impression of how Mission Control were coping with this and how dependent on them were you? It's a tale of two groups. One group in a comfortable control room, fortified by hot coffee and cigarettes, that had to make quick and correct decisions.

9:14also having a whole industry complex behind them, you know, the manufacturers and everything to help them make decisions. The other group had a cold, damp, crippled spacecraft 200 ,000 miles from Earth who had to correctly do those decisions made by the ground and control the spacecraft to do the job. The mission is to land in the Fraumura Highlands and do some exploration. Very rapidly, I guess it must have occurred to you that you're not going there anymore. The thing that you've wanted to do for so long, land on the moon, is not going to happen. How did you feel when you realized that was the case?

9:54I was disappointed. But you have to realize you're 200 ,000 miles out. You're in a spacecraft that's dying. Landing on the moon was the last thing in my mind. As a matter of fact, during the conversation back to the Earth, as we're preparing all these things to get us back, I looked over at Fred. I said, take a good look out there. It's going to be a long time before someone else is out here looking at what we're seeing. And, of course, mission control and everybody said, oh, why did he say that? Oh, no, no. Actually, it was a very good chance that I was going to be right. Did you think that you may not survive this mission?

10:39I had a very good idea that we weren't going to survive. As a matter of fact, if we didn't, we were going to try our best all the way out until the oxygen left us, and that was the end of the deal. You're approaching the moon now. You've managed to check your alignment of your lunar module platform. You know roughly that you've got some guidance. Moon's getting big in the window, and Fred Hayes and Jack Swigert are wanting to take a good look at it. Tell me a bit about that. We felt sort of sad a little bit looking down and saw Mount Maryland at a much higher distance than I did before. And Mount Maryland, that's a feature on the moon that you named in honor of your wife.

11:21Well, it was during the time of training for Apollo 8. We had pictures now of photography of the moon, and it was pretty well thought of that the first lunar landing would be in the Sea of Tranquility. And as we looked at our proposed orbits around the moon on Apollo 8, I noticed a little triangular mountain there right on the coastline of Sea of Tranquility, very distinctive because it was triangular in shape and it had one crater on it. And it pointed right into the Sea of Tranquility. And I said, that would be a good initial point for Apollo 11 to think about. So I named it Mount Maryland after my wife.

12:00And sure enough, Apollo 11 then came around. And I think all of them said, oh, we're over Mount Maryland. It was the initial point to start the descent into the Sea of Tranquility. At this point in the mission, though, you're still coming past the moon. You still have to make some decisions. And they've powered down the module because you don't have enough power to get yourself home. What was the module like once you'd reduced the power in it? Well, it was very quiet. It just got cold. It just got damp, you know. As it got cold, the moisture came out of the atmosphere, and we were worried. We'd go back into the command module, and beads of moisture all through.

12:43And, of course, that worried us. I know we had to get it back on again, but are we going to get it shorts, or you're going to get failures in the electrical system and things like that. It got a little tiring. I remember coming back that I could close my eyes because I'm in zero gravity. I have a little strap on. I just floated and got sleep that way. You didn't get a full sleep. You just fell off and I had a little rest and then he woke up again. When you were resting, where did you choose to rest? Right on the instrument panel. I mean, right alongside of it. The instrument panel in the lunar module.

13:24Yeah. I'm sitting here doing things. I'm tied in. I put my hands together like this, and I close my eyes, and I go to sleep. And I just doze off, and then I kind of wake myself up again, look over and see what Fred's doing, and he's doing the same thing. and either that or someone's calling us and I can hear them on the radio. Give me a sense of how cramped it was in there because this is a tiny space. There's no seats anyway because it's so small. And now you've got not two but three people in there. So what's it like? Well, Fred and I, of course, are in our same spots. In the center of the lunar module is the cap of the engine, the lunar module engine.

14:11It's like a table with a flat part of the table. a little round table and that was Jack's spot. Now we took off our space suits because the suits have rubber inside. It's cold outside. We're sweating on the inside. We didn't want to do that. So we decided that's Fred and I take off our suits and just suffer with the cold. Jim, I want to take you to the part of the mission where you've passed the moon. You've done your burn two hours after passing the moon, and now you're having to power down the lunar module, really to its lowest power level. Can you tell me what it was like once you shut it down to that degree, what it was like inside?

14:57Well, the vehicle, of course, got colder and very, very quiet, and we tried to shut down everything just to save power. One of the big problems was the fact that were also being poisoned by our own exhalation. Because of the lunar module, we had a environmental system that would support two people for two days. We were three people for four days. And unfortunately, the canister, lithium hydroxide canister, to remove the carbon dioxide was becoming saturated. And we didn't think about that ourselves, except that Mission Control was also monitoring everything, fortunately, and everything was still going down via telemetry, that they noticed that the partial pressure of carbon dioxide was increasing.

15:52And then we got an orange light on indicating the same thing. So there was a case of being slowly poisoned had we done nothing, by the time we got back to the earth we would be alive anyway. Carbon dioxide would be poisonous in large amounts. And that's where the ground came in for its initiative. That's where they had Crew System Division and Mission Control, their division there, come up with an idea to using the canisters in the dead command module, which were still very good, although they were square, and this canister in the lunar module was sort of oblong, how to jury-rig it in the command module or the lunar module to make it work.

16:45And it did. It came through. That's one thing that really, you know, saved us. You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service, people shaping our world from all over the world. For this episode of the interview, we're listening back to the conversation I had with Captain Jim Lovell, commander of the aborted Apollo 13 space mission to the moon. We had the great privilege of interviewing him over two mornings at the community library near his home north of Chicago. Now, we knew we were going to get some great storytelling because we'd interviewed Jim about his first flight around the moon on Apollo 8.

17:24But I'd forgotten about his sense of humour and the laugh which rings out, not infrequently, between Jim's tales of danger after danger and threat after threat. It covers a lot of ground, from the traumatic moment of the explosion to the enormous relief at Splashtown. OK, let's return to my conversation with Jim Lovell. It's an unusual procedure, that, because they totally have to improvise how they're going to take, you know, make a square peg fit in a round hole. And they have to do that on the ground and then voice that up, read it over the radio to you. And you have to build it without seeing any pictures of it.

18:04What was that like? Well, not only that, but believe it or not, Houston didn't have a squared command module. lithium hydroxide device. They sent a fellow in his airplane down to Kennedy to get one to bring it back. And then they started to utilize it using duct tape, a piece of plastic, an old sock, a hose, lots of hose, which we had on board. And so we did it one step at a time and we were talking to them as we put out the duct tape to see how long it should be and things like that. You know, these are things that we can do. Now, the next thing, of course, is that you need a set of procedures or instructions to help you power up the command module, and they haven't arrived yet, and you are getting, I guess, a little impatient.

19:02Tell me about that. Well, as we're coming back home again, and we're picking up speed, as now the Earth has us under control, and, of course, its gravity was pulling us back. I kept looking at the Earth, and it was getting a little bigger all the time. And I thought to myself, we don't have the procedures to get the command module back in position. We had to get the guidance system working again to get it reactivated, and we had to make sure that all the environmental system was going back and everything like that. And that was Jack Swicker's job, but he had nothing to work with. And so I got kind of curious or a little bit worried that the mission control down there had not yet put all their heads together to get that system back in operation.

19:50And so I called down. I said, you know, guys, we've got to hurry up. I see the Earth coming in closer. We need to know how to power up the command module. I mean, they stall you a couple of times, don't they? At one point, I think Joe Kerwin, in response to your question, says, you say, is there a checklist? and he says, it exists.

20:12I mean, how did, you know, there's sort of characteristic humor from Joe Kirwin, but how did you receive those sorts of stories? And I think Vance Brand says, you know, we'll get it to you Saturday, Sunday at the latest, and of course you were due to splash down on Friday. Just a little bit too late. But they did. They got their act together, and they started to really work out it. Finally, they started to send it up in pieces to Jack so he would start working. And he was worried because, you know, turning on various things, and we didn't know whether there would be a short or whether, you know, the water would do any damage to it at all.

20:53Fortunately, no damage. And by this time, you've been in space for nearly four days since the accident, nearly six days in total. You must have been exhausted, cold, in pretty poor shape. How did you feel in yourselves? Well, we were cold. We were kind of exhausted. But you'd be surprised how long you can last if you're in deep trouble without a deep sleep. And, of course, when we finally got home, sleep was very, very nice. In your medical pack, you would have had, I guess, some stimulants to help you with the tiredness. Did you use any of that stuff? I did not use any stimulants, which we could very well have done.

21:36But the problem was, if we took it too soon, we would have been wide awake and up. But then when it wore off, you'd be in a worse shape than you were before. You know, that was my thought. And so I stayed away from it. So I wouldn't be so incapacitated once I took a pill that I really was too groggy to do a good job. Fred Hayes of course was beginning to get ill by now he was he was getting a little fever were you worried about him yeah I was worried about Fred if a friend was getting chilled and and I needed Fred sometime in the maneuvers and I wondered what the story was with him and of course we had our our space suits off and it was still kind of cold and getting colder and so I comforted him a little bit, put my arms around him, tried to get my body heat, get him some more heat in his body.

22:35So you now arrived at the point where you have to begin to prepare for re-entry. You're powering up the module. Jack Swigert's in the command module and powering up. What was that like for you to see this thing that you'd switched off, not knowing if it would ever switch on again, come back to life, the command module? Well, I was quite worried, knowing what the problems were. And the first thing I was worried about was could we get the computer up and running again. Fortunately, that little computer worked fine, and we were able to get using the stars to realign the gyros to make sure that they would tell the spacecraft exactly the attitude with respect to the celestial sphere.

23:22And that really worked out. So that was sort of a half point for me. If we could get that going, so that would tell us just where we were with respect to coming back in, and in case we still had to make other maneuvers. And so you've aligned your guidance platform. I guess things are beginning to look up. And I remember reading just before you jettisoned the lunar module, you noticed that Jack Swigert had put a little note on one of the switches to make sure he didn't eject you by accident. Well, that's right, because we spent a lot of time in that lunar module, and all you had to do was push the switch while we were in there taking pictures or something like that, and that would have been the end of the ballgame.

24:03And also the end for him, too, because the hatch was open. So, I mean, you know, oxygen would go from both sides. So you've got the command module on its own now, ready to enter the atmosphere. Famously, the entry took longer than expected. Were you aware of that in the capsule? We intentionally made it longer than expected because we knew that this was going to be a good film. And so we thought, well, if we're here this far, why not?

24:37No, seriously, it was longer than expected because we actually, in this two-degree pie-shaped wedge, we were at the lower end of the two-degree pie-shaped wedge, which made for a longer reentry. We were coming in shallow because we weren't perfect with our navigation coming back, and that's what happened. And you're sitting in your couch there. You come through. When are you aware that the chutes have deployed properly? Just describe to me what that's like from your perspective, rearward-facing, looking through a small window. Do you see them deploy? oh we saw the mains and what they did they come out and they're still ruffled they're so designed not to quickly come out in case they they got broken at the speed and so then as they unleashed or slowly unwung themselves with the then they would blossom out and of course when all three came out very nicely.

25:38Obviously, the crew was very, very happy. And then, of course, splashdown. Tell me about that. Well, we had a little time on the mains coming down. I said, now, gentlemen, this could be kind of rough. I mean, and it was on Apollo 8. Between the swinging of the capsule and the wave action, we actually came down on the edge. So I told them, be prepared. for a pretty rough landing. But the landing was great. The landing happened to be just right. The waves were just right, and the spacecraft just plopped in the water, and there we were. I imagine that must be quite a moment after so much drama, so much hazards, the hatch coming open and you breathing fresh air and having sunlight on your face for the first time.

26:31Yeah, it was a very nice feeling, really, now that we were back on the water. And, of course, we were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so I mean, thank God that the guidance system worried that we weren't 300 miles to the west or the east or something like that. It would take us some time for somebody to come pick us up. But we slowly ejected. I was worried about Fred Hayes. I wanted him to make sure he got... So when we got outside along the... And there was a rubber boat there, too, that helped us. I got Fred on the helicopter first, and then I got Jack second. And, you know, the commanders of sinking ships are always the last to leave.

27:21Thank you for listening to the interview from the BBC World Service. To hear more from Captain Jim Lovell, look for 13 Minutes wherever you get your BBC podcast. You'll also find the latest season about the Space Shuttle. Search for 13 Minutes presents The Space Shuttle. Until the next time, bye for now.

27:56In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. From the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games to the European Athletics Championships. The 2026 sporting calendar is packed full of big events. Keep up with all the action with More Than The Score, the podcast that goes beyond the score sheet.

28:41Join expert BBC sports journalists every Monday to Friday for interviews with sports stars, big talking points and the stories behind the headlines. More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.