Based on the original transcript

View this page in the original transcript

When Apollo 13 launched from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on Saturday 11th April 1970, no one involved could have anticipated that the mission would be anything but a smooth third Moon landing. The journey would instead revolve around an explosion in the Service Module that turned it into one of the most famous of not only the Apollo program but of human space exploration in the 20th century.

This site allows you to explore transcripts of radio communications between the Apollo 13 crew and the NASA personnel back at Houston. Included with the transcripts are photographs taken both from the ground and by the crew in space, as well as other information about the mission, the problems that occurred, and the measures that were taken, both on ground and in the Command and Lunar Modules that made up the crew areas of Apollo 13.

How the site works

The main textual content of this site comes from a transcript of radio communications between the crew and mission control; there are some limitations which stem from the original recordings.

Each line starts with a timestamp, in Ground Elapsed Time, which is the time (in days, hours, minutes and seconds or some subset for shorter missions or where we don't have timestamps down to the second) since lift off; photographs are shown inline at a suitable place. You can navigate through the transcript using the phases of the mission, and key scenes within them, or search for things that might interest you using the box at the top of the page. While browsing through the transcript, there are also links that take you to the same place in the original typescript.

You can help

This site can be improved, and you can help — whether by correcting remaining errors (although we hope there aren't many left), by adding more photos, or marking further glossary items. The easiest way to report small errors, suggest new photos and so forth, is by dropping us an email to spacelog@googlegroups.com.

There are always other missions in the pipeline. If you'd like to help get them cleaned up and published, there's a simple guide to getting involved, or if you're more technical all our code, and the transcript files, is available on GitHub, where there is information on how to get up and running. (If you're up to it, you can even fork the repository, and issue a pull request to us when you're done.)

Find out how