I don’t remember much of the actual events of April 1970 any more than I do the events of July 1969 from the actual time. But I do remember the movie released 25 years ago and going off and researching and reading about what happened. It is easy in the light of 2020 to look back and wonder how these things can happen but what amazed me most was the ingenuity and how a world came together to assist to get 3 men safely home from space. In the light of how we are all spending this Easter in 2020 – we need again the world to pull together and we need those out of the box and clever ideas to solve the current Covid-19 situation.
I have recorded a video and it is available on my Youtube channel – I wonder what might have been different if the original Apollo 13 crew headed by Alan Shepherd, had not been replaced because of his inner ear infection, with Jim Lovell’s crew – we know that if the failure had occurred only hours earlier they would not have had sufficient power to return to Earth and if later they could not have got back into an orbit to take advantage of the lunar gravity and would have been caught in lunar orbit. I also look at briefly the part that Australia played in the rescue mission with Parkes – The Dish – relaying the signals and being able to pick up the signal in the first place. So many things coming together made this mission succeed in spite of never getting to the Moon.