Apollo 13 is a historical NASA crewed space mission, the seventh in the Apollo program, which was intended to be the third human landing on the Moon. Launched on April 11, 1970, aboard a Saturn V rocket from the Kennedy Space Center, its original objective was to explore the Fra Mauro region of the Moon. The mission is often characterized as a "successful failure" due to the safe return of the crew despite a catastrophic in-flight emergency.
The mission's objective was aborted on April 13, 1970, approximately 56 hours into the flight, when an explosion occurred in one of the Service Module's oxygen tanks. The explosion, which disabled the spacecraft's primary electrical and life-support systems, was later traced to a short circuit caused by an oversight in replacing an underrated component during a design modification. The crew, consisting of Commander James Lovell, Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise, and Command Module Pilot John Swigert, used the Lunar Module, named Aquarius, as a "life boat" to sustain them.
The mechanism for survival involved Mission Control designing innovative, on-the-fly solutions, such as adapting the Command Module's lithium hydroxide canisters to the Lunar Module using plastic bags, cardboard, and duct tape to remove dangerous levels of carbon dioxide. The crew looped around the Moon and returned safely to Earth on April 17, 1970. The mission connects to the subsequent Apollo 14 mission, which was reassigned the original Fra Mauro landing site. Following the incident, later Apollo spacecraft were modified to include a third isolated oxygen tank and additional emergency battery power.