One of my all-time favourite scenes from a space film is of a bleeding Neil Armstrong wandering into his home like a thoughtless ghost, grabbing a glass of iced-tea from the freezer, taking a sip, placing it in the sink and then wandering out after telling his wife Janet that he has some unfinished work in office. This scene from Damien Chazelle’s First Man (2018) not only distils the mortal risk and restlessness that fuelled the space race, but also captures the human cost of scientific innovation. The road to the moon, after all, was paved with many funerals too. It’s something that haunts Chazelle’s film and separates it from the usually triumphant tone of dozens of space films before it.
In 1969, man did step on the moon. But it was never a sure thing. The technology was supremely intricate and the margin of an ‘acceptable’ error was down several decimals. Even after being as thorough as possible, NASA’s space missions were built on corpses of some of their smartest employees. It’s a thing Peter Middleton’s Apollo 13: Survival does well to remember through its runtime of nearly 100 minutes.
Stitched together using archival footage, Middleton retells the harrowing Apollo 13 mission. Earlier dramatised in the 1995 film by director Ron Howard, simply called Apollo 13, Middleton uses its most iconic line as his docu-feature’s jump-off point. We see an explosion on the spacecraft and Jim Lovell’s words (immortalised by Tom Hanks) come through the radio: “Houston, we’ve had a problem!” [Hanks’ version was Houston, we have a problem – the rephrasing was acknowledged by writer William Broyles Jr. since the original line didn’t feel ‘urgent’ enough]. Middleton’s documentary assumes most people watching his film have already seen Howard’s thriller. So he doesn’t spend too much time unveiling the ‘what’, instead choosing to focus on the ‘why’ and ‘how’.
A mere 10 months after Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon with Apollo 11, NASA upped the stakes with their mission on Apollo 13. This time they would be trying to land on the hilly terrain of the moon. Lovell, chosen as the Commander of the Apollo 13, after having been to space in Apollo 8, was already looking forward to naming a hill on the moon after his wife: Mount Marilyn. The sheer volume of archival footage is impressive, which means Middleton can recreate the story entirely through them with minimal reconstruction and a few voiceovers of the people featured.
Something that intrigued me as a viewer is Marilyn’s discomfort with ‘13’. A widespread belief amongst (primarily superstitious) people is that it’s an ‘unlucky’ number. To quash this superstition, NASA announced its launch on April 11 at 13:13. Even as the pragmatic lot did have a laugh about it, one of the pilots came down with German measles only a day before the proposed liftoff. The eventual threat to the spacecraft and its astronauts could make anyone question their beliefs. Even in an exacting science like rocket science, there is probably some level of alchemy at play. It reminded me of a moment from Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Return to Space (2022) – a profile of the SpaceX initiative – where Elon Musk is heard saying something to the tune of ‘One superpower I’d like, would be to be the luckiest man in the world” seconds before the liftoff of a third Falcon rocket. It’s a fascinating, contradictory space – where the most scientific and pragmatic among us humbly cede control to the circumstances around us.
A still from ‘Apollo 13: Survival’.
Apollo 13: Survival meticulously retells the distressed journey of the crew – Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. Right away, seeing the oxygen spray into open space, they fix it using a cardboard among other things. Spending nearly three days with little air, no sleep, and just enough electricity to switch on two light bulbs. The mission control scrambles to find solutions that would usually take years, and tries to compute them in hours. Every second counts, and all solutions need to be 99.99% correct. No pressure.
Middleton’s film ends with Swigert talking about how the crew is often asked: whether they consider Apollo 13 a success or a failure. It didn’t land on the moon like it was supposed to. But what NASA learned about space flights while trying to bring them back with limited resources, probably prevented similar mistakes in future flights. Also, it provided a live example of how much a spacecraft can be stretched in worst case scenarios.
Apollo 13 showcased the best of human problem solving, where the smartest folk improvised solutions when pushed into a corner. It’s also a portrait of when the world came together, without any malice in their hearts, uniting under one hope. It’s only a glimpse of what the entire human race could accomplish if it trumped all in-fighting and pettiness, and reached for the stars… together. How wonderful it would be if we got over our conqueror complex, and held our explorer selves more closely. We could do with more such reminders in 2024.
*Apollo 13: Survival is currently streaming on Netflix.
