He served NASA on two accident investigation commissions, for Apollo 13 and the Challenger.
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April 1970 witnessed remarkable flight and ground crew resilience and ingenuity during an aborted Apollo 13 mission.
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Cameron lurks in the background, leaving the limelight to Apollo 13 star Bill Paxton, who narrates the film.
Most memorable: Astronauts on Apollo 13 used duct tape to help put together air scrubbers to keep themselves alive.
And as Apollo 13 taught us, even in crisis, there can be triumph.
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When the Apollo 13 spaceship blew up 200, 000 miles from Earth, astronauts used the moon's gravity to slingshot the capsule back home.
As anyone who has seen the incredible movie Apollo 13 knows, one of the biggest challenges of the mission was making course corrections.
Using those procedures, Swigert and Lovell powered up the command module, and Apollo 13 splashed down safely in the Pacific on April 17, 1970.
On April 11, it will have been forty-three years since the Apollo 13 lunar mission became one of the greatest death-defying adventures in history.
In 1970, the ill-fated Apollo 13 moon mission launched from Florida.
Standing in our front yard watching a half moon over the Western horizon, I remember wondering whether the crippled Apollo 13 Command Module would ever see splashdown.
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Apollo 13 producer Brian Grazer was then brought in to run the show and hired Billy Crystal to replace Eddie Murphy after the latter withdrew as host.
Thinking about this in the context of Apollo 13, I'm wondering what could be done to prevent some or all of the science payload from re-entering the atmosphere.
He returned to NASA twice to serve on boards of enquiry, the first into the near-disaster of Apollo 13, the second into the disintegration of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.
Most important right now is successfully closing the leak and after what has been compared to an Apollo 13-type effort is completed attention should be turned to a full and thorough investigation into all involved parties.
Like the astronauts aboard Apollo 13 who had to build a CO2 filter from whatever was available in their capsule under the direction of engineers back on Earth, we are forced to innovate in real time.
As you can see this is not a place of fantastic design but given that you have access to pictures like the one taken from Apollo 13 just before the side of the command module blew away after an explosion - who needs fantastic design?
Those of you who have seen the film Apollo 13 know the story - but on the site is a transcript of the mission where you can read the conversations between a crew in a crippled space craft and the guys on earth trying to get them home - it's absolutely fascinating.
After an explosion in Apollo 13's service module cut off propulsion and power, the lunar excursion module (LEM) was used as a lifeboat to provide life support to the three astronauts, and the engine of its descent stage for course changes, until the command module could re-enter the atmosphere after a long coast around the moon.
Before being chosen in 1962 as one of the "Group II" astronauts -- which included Apollo 13 commander James Lovell along with such legends as Frank Borman, Pete Conrad and John Young -- Armstrong was one of the elite pilots selected to fly the X-15 rocket plane up to five times the speed of sound and toward the edge of space.
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