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- Well, I was hit by Apollo 13 like everybody else was. I was traveling to Langley to work on some tests we were gonna run in their wind tunnels there. And then I got in there and called home and my husband said, they're in trouble. I was just like, oh no, oh no, no, no, no.

- NASA has this way of making what we do look easy. What people don't see when they see those snippets, those little clips played on NASA TV of the cool parts, the things moving around and floating in microgravity, what they don't see is the hours of study, the hours of preparation, the hours of meetings, the hours of risk trade discussions. If we do this, this could happen, and how would we be prepared for that? [solemn music]

- Within mission control, literally nothing made sense in those first few seconds. Very quickly it looks like we've lost one of our fuel cells and possibly a second one. Cryo tank two, oxygen tank two, is reading zero.

- At the time of the explosion, I was in the lunar module. I was still buttoning up and putting away equipment from a TV show we had completed. And really, we were subsequently gonna get ready and go to sleep. I knew it was a real happening and I knew it was not normal and serious. Just, at that instant, I did not necessarily know that it was life threatening.

- Apollo 13 was definitely a human-caused accident. It was caused by a group of engineers down at the Cape who didn't recognize that they had a real problem on their hand and they got go fever.

- [Astronaut] Things happened fast. In seconds, it was all on you. Then I used some words that sorta surprised me after the fact. I say we've got a good Main Bus 8, don't do anything to screw it up. The Lunar Module's attached and we can use that as a lifeboat if we need to. Now, get me some backup people in here and get me more computing and communications resources. It took some minutes to become obvious that there was, for whatever reason, that was a leak that the explosion had caused in the second oxygen tank. The first things I felt when I knew that we had lost that one tank was I was just sick to my stomach with disappointment. I knew we had an abort. [chilling music]

- Because the oxygen was running out, it was gonna kill the fuel cells, we had to hurry up to do stuff.

- I've been here for all three of the tragedies. In each case, what I have seen is the coming together of a lot of different people and organizations to fix it, take care of it, and get on with it.

- We can't ever eliminate risk. Failures we expected aren't always what we see. Sometimes there's failures which we didn't foresee or happen sooner than we anticipated.

- [Astronaut] Make it very clear what can happen if you do have the right people, the risk skill mix, that are trained and they're assembled in a team and they work together under right leadership, what a miracle can happen.

- I didn't know who to call. I didn't know who I could find out anything more from. And so there I sat, all by myself in a town I had never been in, and prayed on it. All I could find out really was what was going on on TV. We didn't have cellphones.

- 13 just was something else we needed to do and get out of the way. I mean, that's historical context.

- As a flight director, you're ultimately responsible for the development of the missions themselves and then the training to prepare for 'em and then the execution of them. And that hasn't changed, even a small amount, since the early days, the original days. Obviously we have different technology now. Our jobs, I would say, are far easier.... Maybe not far easier, but easier. When they started doing things, they were doing it for the first time. So we have the advantage of leveraging off of the work that they did. And then we have more powerful tools. Our computers and our consoles are far stronger. They have artificial intelligence in them, so it just makes our job easier. But the actual job of the flight director, of pulling your team together of puttin' the missions together of training and then executing the mission, that piece really hasn't changed at all.

- We had a major computer system failure on the space station on Saturday, and less than three days later, less than 72 hours later, it was repaired. Well, it took a space walk. Two humans had to go outside the space station and fix it and Jack and Peggy were able to go out and do that less than three days later. That is a Herculean effort and it went great. They even got something else done. And so, I think it would help the public understanding of what we do a little bit better for us to share just how challenging some of these things are. [relaxing acoustic music]