Witness the Real Life Apollo 13 Disaster As it Actually Happened

YouTube’s lunarmodule5, a treasure trove of jaw-dropping space videos, takes us onboard Apollo 13 to relive the harrowing hour when the doomed moon mission turned into a quest for survival. No Hollywood movie could ever muster the real-life drama and tension of this moment.

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How NASA MacGyvered the Crippled Apollo 13 Mission Safely Home

How NASA MacGyvered the Crippled Apollo 13 Mission Safely Home

When mission commander James A. Lovell uttered his gut-wrenching warning, "Houston, we have a problem," neither he nor the army of NASA engineers back on Earth really knew if his crew would—or even could—make it back home.

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Apollo 13: The Real Terror of Space [Movie Night]

I know Neil Armstrong was an Apollo 11 guy, but Apollo 13 still gives you a lot of insight into the sort of danger astronauts willingly put themselves. Landing on the moon is an insane accomplishment, and there was so much that could have gone wrong. More »

Pioneering astronaut Neil Armstrong dies at 82

Pioneering astronaut Neil Armstrong dies at 82

It’s a story that we hoped we’d never have to report. Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on Earth’s Moon, has died at the age of 82 after complications from heart surgery three weeks earlier. His greatest accomplishment very nearly speaks for itself — along with help from fellow NASA astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, he changed the landscape of space exploration through a set of footprints. It’s still important to stress his accomplishments both before and after the historic Apollo 11 flight, though. He was instrumental to the Gemini and X-series test programs in the years before Apollo, and followed his moonshot with roles in teaching aerospace engineering as well as investigating the Apollo 13 and Space Shuttle Challenger incidents. What more can we say? Although he only spent a very small portion of his life beyond Earth’s atmosphere, he’s still widely considered the greatest space hero in the US, if not the world, and inspired a whole generation of astronauts. We’ll miss him.

[Image credit: NASA Apollo Archive]

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