Interview: Jim Lovell relives the successful failure of Apollo 13 – Astronomy Magazine

Lovell: Well, it did become more famous in the beginning, at least in the eyes of NASA. I have to tell you an interesting story. We came back. Its a failure. So the spacecraft, the command module, which was the only thing left of Apollo 13, really, was in a warehouse down in Florida for about six months. Then, they tried to forget about it. They wanted to go on to Apollo 14 and everything like that.

Then France called up, Paris called up, [the] museum at Le Bourget, which was where Lindbergh landed. They asked the Smithsonian, Do you have any space artifacts that we could have in this museum? Then the lights came on in the Smithsonian and also NASA, Well, we can get rid of this spacecraft. So they exiled Apollo 13 to Le Bourget, and it stayed there for 20 years.

About 18 years after that, I had a classmate that went out there and he saw it and he wrote me a letter. He said, Do you know where your spacecraft is? I didnt at that time. No one told me it was in Le Bourget.Then, later on, a year or so later, my wife [Marilyn] and I were in Paris and we went out to this museum, which was at the airfield there, and there we saw it. We walked up to it. It was still on the cradle that they had rolled it in on. It was all by itself, just about, nothing else around it. The hatch was missing. The instrument panel was missing. The seats were missing. The only thing I saw was a piece of paper that was stuck on the side that said, Apollo 13, and gave the names of the three crew members. And then Ron Howard made the movie. Of course they made the movie that was shown in France, and all those French people said, Oh, its out there in Le Bourget. Lets go see it.

Meanwhile, NASA was so embarrassed and the Smithsonian, that a museum out of Hutchinson, Kansas, called the Cosmosphere, offered to go get [it] and bring it back and pay for it and they did. And all those Frenchmen now were mad because they had kept it for 20 years, and now it came back here. [Laughs.]

Astronomy: Do you recall what the first thing you and Marilyn talked about once you returned after Apollo 13? What did that conversation go like? Did [she] encourage you to find a different career path maybe?

Lovell: Well, I have to tell you another interesting story along those lines. About a week or two weeks after we got picked up in Hawaii and then we came back, we had a big press conference of course. All the NASA people came in and all the reporters came in, and TV people and stuff like that, and a lot of the families came in to listen to the whole thing. We were in the auditorium down in the Johnson Space Center. So we started talking about that.

At the beginning of the conference, a reporter asked, Jim, are you gonna ask for another flight? Obviously, this was not successful. Before that, on Apollo 11 [and] 12, management said, Look, if theres a problem with this flight, well get you back and well give you the very next one.

So when that question came up from the reporter, I thought to myself, because management was right behind us, here was the perfect opportunity to put them on the wall and say yes, because they had not talked to us, the 13, just 11 and 12. I was about ready to say something like that when, out in the audience, I saw a hand go up. Then I saw it go down like this. [Jim gives a thumbs down gesture.] It was my wife. [Laughs.] I could tell. I said, No. I think this is the last flight Im gonna make. [Laughs.]

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Interview: Jim Lovell relives the successful failure of Apollo 13 - Astronomy Magazine