Remembering The 50th Anniversary Of Apollo 13 With A Short Story By Tom Hanks

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Fifty years ago today the Apollo 13 mission took off from Florida, bound for a moon landing. Then, 55 hours into the flight, there was an explosion.

Jim Lovell, the mission commander, famously reported:

For days, Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert worked with dozens of flight controllers to solve a range of potentially fatal challenges to ultimately make it safely back to Earth. The mission became known as NASA's most successful failure.

Lovell later called it "a real triumph of teamwork."

In 1995, the journey was chronicled on the big screen in a hit movie starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon and directed by Ron Howard that was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning two.

We were so glad to hear Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson, who are longtime supporters of our newsroom, are back home from Australia and on the mend after testing positive for COVID-19.

In 2014, Hanks wrote a story imagining a more DIY trip to the moon titled “Alan Bean Plus Four.” It was published in The New Yorker. Here's an audio version for your listening pleasure: