Book Review: 'Apollo 13'

© 1994 Houghton Mifflin/© 2006 Mariner Books. Cover design by Clifford Stoltze Design, Cover image: Photodisc

In October of 1994, New York-based Houghton Mifflin published the first edition of Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. Written by retired Navy Captain Jim Lovell and science beat journalist Jeffrey Kluger, the book tells the story of Lovell's final - and star-crossed - space flight in April 1970: Apollo 13. Shortly after its publication, Imagine Entertainment founders Brian Grazer and Ron Howard bought the film rights and adapted the book as the 1995 movie Apollo 13.  As a result of the film's success, Houghton Mifflin changed the title from Lost Moon to Apollo 13 when it released the paperback edition to coincide with the film's theatrical premiere.

Lovell, a Naval Aviator and test pilot before joining NASA as a member of the agency's Astronaut Group II - "the New Nine" - in 1962. As a result, Lovell and his eight colleagues (which included Neil Armstrong and Pete Conrad) joined the six remaining Mercury Program veterans for NASA's Gemini and Apollo spaceflight programs. Thus, Lovell became the first astronaut to fly four times in space (pilot of Gemini 7, commander of Gemini 12, command module pilot of Apollo 8, and commander of Apollo 13) and only one of three men to fly to the moon twice.

However, as Apollo 13 reminds us, of those three men (the other two are Eugene Cernan and John W. Young), Lovell did not get to walk on the moon. His mission - the seventh of the Apollo manned flights and third planned lunar landing - went awry when one of the oxygen tanks in the Command/Service Module (CSM) Odyssey exploded 55 hours into Apollo 13's flight (April 13, 1970). The explosion crippled the Odyssey and forced Lovell and his two crewmates, Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert and Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise, to shut down the CSM and use Apollo 13's Lunar Module (or "LEM") Aquarius as a lifeboat while Flight Director Gene Krantz and his crew in Houston's Manned Mission Control Center. 

Official NASA illustration of a docked LM (pronounced LEM) and CSM Apollo spacecraft configured in Earth-to-the-moon flight mode. Graphic credit:  NASA 

 A timeless tribute to the enduring American spirit, Apollo 13 tells the story of America's fifth mission to the moon, a mission that nearly ended in catastrophe in April 1970. Only fifty-five hours into the flight, disaster struck for Jim Lovell and two other astronauts after an explosion left them with a rapidly declining supply of oxygen and power. Lovell and Kluger vividly chronicle how the men were forced to abandon the main ship for the lunar module, a tiny craft designed to keep two men alive for only two days. At home, a nation watched the desperate efforts of Mission Control to bring the crew back in what many consider NASA's finest hour. - Apollo 13 back cover blurb

My Take

"Uh, Houston, we've had a problem." - Jim Lovell to Mission Control, April 13, 1970

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that I have always had a fascination with space. Some of my earliest memories include a mid-1960s visit to (then) Cape Kennedy with my mom and one of her friends who lived in nearby Cocoa Beach, plus very hazy flashbacks to those occasions (mainly Apollo 8 in December of 1968, the first lunar landing - Apollo 11 - in July of '69, and the nail-biting events of April 1970) when I watched news reports on Colombian television as a boy.
I can't honestly say I remember all of those events clearly or accurately; however, I can tell you that those boyhood experiences led to a lifelong interest in manned spaceflight and - to some degree, anyway - my love for Star Trek and Star Wars. 

Perversely, I only have a couple of non-fiction books about Project Apollo in my modest library: Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts and Apollo 13, which was originally titled Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. That isn't a lot of books, considering that once upon a time I had a bedroom (in another country) which was decorated with models of the Saturn V booster rocket, the CSM, and the LM, as well as a collage of newspaper clippings - including a detailed chart of a typical mission profile - that hung on one of the walls.

In Apollo 13, Lovell (the only astronaut I have met in person) and co-author Jeffrey Kluger (a senior writer for Time magazine who specializes in science and space-related topics) pull off the same trick that Al Reinert, William Broyles Jr., and an uncredited John Sayles did in their 1995 script based on the book: they take the dramatic events that began with the launch of Apollo 13 at 2:13 PM EST on April 11, 1970, and turn them into a tense life-or-death narrative that holds the reader's attention.

Apollo 13 tells its story in a non-fiction novel style; it's written in a traditional third-person narrative despite the fact that one of the authors was the Apollo 13 mission commander himself. It begins with a darkly humorous prologue that addresses one of the contemporary myths about the mission: namely, that NASA issued poison pills to its crews in case they ever had a catastrophic failure of an Apollo spacecraft in flight. As the book points out, the crew, including Lovell, thought the notion of NASA-issued "suicide pills" was ridiculous, considering that if the astronauts ever considered such an eventuality - which they did not - all they had to do was open the Command Module's cabin vent, which normally remained closed until the capsule was on the surface of the Pacific Ocean after splashdown.  After dispensing with that old rumor, Apollo 13's prologue describes the tension aboard Odyssey as Lovell, Haise, and Swigert wait for Mission Control to come up with a  solution to their current dire situation. In addition, the media coverage of Apollo 13 - a sore spot for NASA and the crews - is also brought front and center as Kluger and Lovell describe how ABC's Jules Bergman interrupted the taped telecast of The Dick Cavett Show to give late night viewers the first report that something had gone wrong with Apollo 13.

After that, Apollo 13 gives readers a detailed account of NASA's efforts to overcome the tragedy of Apollo One (January 27, 1967) and land men on the moon and returning them safely to Earth before President Kennedy's famous "before the decade (the 1960s) is out" deadline, plus events in Jim Lovell's career that led up to the events of April 1970. And of course, the ill-starred mission itself is covered in great detail, including recreations of the back-and-forth dialogue between the Apollo 13 astronauts and Mission Control, the tensions mounting aboard the badly-damaged spacecraft, and Flight Director Gene Krantz and his team's herculean efforts to bring Lovell, Haise, and Swigert back home - alive.

This is one of those classic stories of survival where the protagonists face all kinds of adversity - and with a great deal of help from countless others. beat the odds. Like the film it inspired, Apollo 13 is a story full of drama and suspense, as well as a lot of omens and weird coincidences - such as Marilyn Lovell's loss of her wedding ring in a shower on the day of the launch, as well as the ominous ring of Apollo 13's launch time: 1:13 PM Houston time, or 1313 in military time.

And even though the book discusses many technical details about one of the most complex machines ever built by humans - the Apollo spacecraft - Apollo 13 never bogs the reader down in a swamp of NASA jargon. Thus, the book is informative and revealing without the audience needing to have a Ph.D. in rocket science.

Like most non-fiction books about a historical event - especially one as complex and dramatic as the Apollo 13 mission - Apollo 13 has an insert of black-and-white photos.  Most, of course, depict the men and machines involved in the fifth manned flight to the moon, including a shot of the mighty Saturn V at liftoff and the impromptu ticker tape parade held for the returning astronauts in Chicago. Others, though, are of other missions, including the ill-fated crew of Apollo One, Lovell's two Gemini flights, Apollo 8, and shots of the crew's families and Mission Control crews during the nearly six-days-long mission.

The book also has three helpful appendices: a timeline of the Apollo 13 mission; a list (dramatis personae) of the personnel involved; and a list of the manned missions in the Apollo program.

Beautifully written and expertly told, Apollo 13 is a great literary recreation of an event that is almost half a century distant from us. It's a time machine back to the Apollo era, a yin-and-yang time marked by both tragedy and triumph, hope and despair, and a nation's glimpse at a Can Do spirit that seems to have dissipated in the decades that followed.