In April 1970, when their spacecraft was about 330,000 km away from the Earth, they heard a loud bang, suddenly. A huge bang that shook the entire spacecraft. Within a few seconds, the warning lights and alarms start going on. It was found that one of the oxygen tanks had burst. And the other oxygen tank was leaking rapidly.
The mission control on the ground couldn’t believe it. They believed that the instruments were malfunctioning. But the astronauts in the spacecraft could see through the window that the air was leaking. On the other hand, they see that because of the blast, the spacecraft had shifted from its path so much that it was going kilometres away from the Earth every second.
Within a few hours, the astronauts in Apollo 13 were so far away from the Earth that it became a new record. To date, no human has gone so far from the Earth as these three astronauts did during the Apollo 13 mission. Forget landing on the moon, the question back then was whether they could return to Earth alive. This is the distressing story of Apollo 13.
