Survival Director Found Beauty in Near Tragedy

It’s been more than 60 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, but leaving Earth remains a tricky proposition. One only needs to look at the recent travails of the Boeing Starliner for evidence. That’s easy to forget in an age of ever-increasing space tourism, in which billionaires treat rocket ships as hobbies. The new Netflix documentary Apollo 13: Survival, which debuted September 5, is a reminder of just how dangerous the deep dark void above us can be.

On April 11, 1970, a Saturn V rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center. Aboard were three astronauts: mission commander Jim Lovell, lunar module pilot Fred Haise, and command module pilot Jack Swigert, a last-minute replacement after original crew member Ken Mattingly was exposed to the rubella virus. The plan was for Lovell and Swigert to become the fifth and sixth people to ever set foot on the Moon, but just two days into the mission, there was an explosion. The situation was dire, and set off a frantic race to figure out a way to bring the crew home.

It wasn’t the disaster that came to define Apollo 13. A far worse outcome occurred on January 21, 1967, when all three Apollo 1 astronauts were killed in a cabin fire during a launch rehearsal test. Rather, it was the crew’s bravery and the ground team’s ingenuity, culminating in a near-miraculous safe return, that made the third trip to the Moon so compelling. The mission’s claim to what might be the second-most famous phrase ever uttered in space doesn’t hurt, though Jim Lovell’s “Houston, we’ve had a problem” is almost always misquoted.

“Apollo 13 is such an iconic story, and, along with Apollo 11, it’s one of the two flights from that Apollo era, which loom the largest in the popular imagination,” said Apollo 13: Survival director Peter Middleton in an interview with Gizmodo. “Of course, Apollo 11, to all intents and purposes, was a technological triumph, and Apollo 13 is kind of in the shadow of that.” In the wake of the euphoria of landing on the Moon, Apollo 13 made the public realize, “what can go wrong in deep space,” he said.

Despite its iconic status, Middleton said he was surprised at how little younger generations knew about the mission. Some people, he said, confuse it with the Challenger space shuttle explosion, which happened almost 16 years later. Many hadn’t even seen the 1995 blockbuster, in which Tom Hanks starred as Lovell. Middleton noted that, as of 2024, more time had passed between the present day and that film’s release, than had elapsed between the mission and its debut.

That Apollo 13 could fade from memory was part of the reason Middleton decided to take it on as his next subject. The film combines archival footage, much of it never before seen by the public, with brief re-enacted footage, and audio of the astronauts and mission control. The film was made with the cooperation of Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell and his family, including access to their own archive of photos and film.

Despite the family’s involvement, the film does not contain any new interviews with anyone involved with the mission. Instead, Middleton opted to use only previously recorded clips.

“We really wanted to situate the audience in that sense of kind of unfolding drama,” he said. “In order to do that, we wanted to find those voices that felt like they were anchored to the footage of their younger selves.”

The result is a gripping overview of Apollo 13, from preparation, to launch, to the fateful explosion, and the ensuing efforts to bring the command module and its passengers home safely. It’s a story that’s familiar to anyone who ever saw the Ron Howard movie, but finds new tension thanks to the audio. It’s an important reminder that the calm voices beaming back and forth between space and Earth belonged to actual people, who actually lived through this ordeal.

What’s often lost is the context in which the mission took place. The Vietnam War was raging. Almost two years to the day before liftoff, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated, followed by Robert Kennedy. The Cold War had reached a period of detente, but the threat of nuclear annihilation remained. By 1970, a growing number of scientists were becoming alarmed by the increasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Despite being imperiled hundreds of thousands of miles from their home planet, the astronauts were hardly alone. As one CBS news anchor quoted in the film observed, Earth’s inhabitants are also hurtling through space, on a ship where resources are depleting, and there is no mission control working to save us. Five days after Apollo 13’s astronauts splashed down, the planet celebrated the first ever Earth Day.

“We felt one of the underappreciated or underrepresented legacies of the Apollo program was the unique perspective that it gave of our planet,” said Middleton. “Being able to see the Earth as this lone source of life in the cosmos from the perspective of the Moon, from deep space with human eyes, was a really transformative moment in 20th century history.”

Apollo 13 and the other early space program missions gave humanity an unprecedented view of Earth’s fragility, but also became a global inspiration through its participants’ ingenuity and hard work. That may be a romantic notion, easy to dismiss in a day where space travel has become a tourist pastime, but there can be no denying that the three astronauts themselves came back with a new perspective on the planet they returned to.

“There’s a beautiful quote that we fixated on from Jack Swigert, the command module pilot,” said Middleton. “He talks about this idea that, for a brief moment in time, the whole world was together. They weren’t three American astronauts stuck out in space. They were three human beings, the furthest ambassadors of the human race. Offers of help came in from all over the globe to try and get them home safely. It was one of those rare moments, those real moments that remind us about common humanity. I think that’s why the mission and the flight and that crisis endures more than 50 years later.”