On 13 April 1970, the Apollo 13 mission to the Moon suffered a critical failure when an oxygen tank in the service module exploded, crippling the spacecraft.
The crew—Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise—reported the incident to Mission Control with the now-famous phrase, “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
The explosion forced NASA to abort the planned lunar landing and instead focus all efforts on safely returning the astronauts to Earth in a dramatic and ultimately successful rescue operation.
