The Episode

Houston, we have a podcast. We watched Apollo 13 (1995) and reached for the moon (and to be fair, we reach for a lot of things in this episode). We try to recall the astronauts aboard Apollo 13, if there is a training session in the beginning of the film, and we all gang up on Dan Jaquette.

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The Ratings

Data to Come

The Trailer

Totes Regrets

By Molly Chase

Bold claim, Earthling

In the podcast, I claimed that the weightlessness in Gravity did not look “as authentic” as what we saw in Apollo 13. Bold claim for earth-bound casual moviegoer Molly Chase. Take that, Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón. Almost as soon as I said it, I worried I maybe should not have been so glib. Plus we’re talking about filmmaking so advanced that acclaimed director and technology junkie James Cameron called Gravity “the best space film ever.”

The Apollo 13 cast and crew rode the NASA training aircraft lovingly nicknamed the “vomit comet” to achieve weightlessness. Nailed it. But boy howdy did we underestimate what that entailed. Overcoming technical and human/stomach limitations, the cast and crew logged nearly four hours of weightlessness, 25 seconds at a time. They eventually completed 612 flight parabolas – flying about 30 or 40 each flight, two flights a day – with visionary director Ron Howard calling tightly choreographed takes like a quarterback calls plays. Well done, everyone.

By contrast, Gravity used a variety of methods including filming underwater, using a 12-wire suspension system operated by puppeteers, building a revolutionary lightbox and blah blah so boring who cares.

Houston, we have a problem

Here, I’ll take you down to nerd town and point out that it was actually Jack Swigert who said this line – not Jim Lovell as portrayed by Tom Hanks -- and that his words were more precisely “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” For the most part, Apollo 13 took very few liberties with reality. For starts, the explosion really did happen very shortly (9 minutes) after their broadcast to Earth and Marilyn Lovell really did drop her wedding ring down the shower drain. (Though superstition-wary Jim Lovell is quick to point out that it caught in the drain trap and was retrieved. Also he was unamused and unmoved by the idea that 13 is unlucky. Even though the explosion happened on April 13. Whatever. We're scientists, dammit!)

Stir the tanks

On the podcast I claimed that I saw a special screening of this movie at the Austin Film Festival, but was otherwise fuzzy on details. Here are those details! The 2009 panel included Ron Howard, Clint Howard, NASA mission control Flight Dynamics Officer Jerry Bostick, Flight Controller John Aaron, EECOM Sy Liebergot and Apollo 13 mission commander Capt. Jim Lovell. It was Sy Liebergot who made the call to stir the tanks that caused the explosion. But as he pointed out, had he followed the original schedule the explosion would have happened when the lunar module was detached from the Odyssey, dooming the astronauts to a very bad end. Gah! Stir those tanks early and often, America.

22. Apollo 13