‘Apollo 13 had a near-zero chance of survival – but Mum always thought Dad would make it back’

In April 1970, a mission encountered trouble when an onboard explosion on the Moon-bound spacecraft left the crew leaking oxygen into space, 320km away from Earth. A resourceful solution was devised by using sticky tape to fashion a makeshift air filter from a sock and a flight manual cover, provided they had manual cover – a makeshift disposal that would keep them alive during their orbital voyage and safe return back to Earth.

A new documentary, "Apollo 13: Survival", is due out on Netflix this month. It features over 7,000 hours of original footage in a bid to tell the story of Nasa's Apollo 13 mission in a more personal light.

Over a video call from his home in Texas – a Lego model of the Saturn 5 rocket that powered the Apollo missions standing on a shelf behind him – the laid-back Jeff Lovell, 58, admits that when the documentary's director, Peter Middleton, "came to me with the idea for the film, I said: 'What makes it unique?' He said he wanted to interweave the experience of our family in such a way that it gives people a whole new perspective. We granted him access to numerous hours of home footage and private photographs. I hope it adds an emotional, personal touch to the story."

Here's the paraphrased text:
Middleton's film is a tribute to Jim Lovell's wife, Marilyn, who sadly passed away last August, aged 93 - Jim is 96 years old. "My parents were an inseparable pair," Jeff notes. "They were high school sweethearts from a deprived background in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dad was raised by a single mother in a small, single-room flat, sleeping on the sofa. Mum, who was youngest of five, grew up through the austerity of the Depression and the war. She typed up Dad's PhD thesis herself. She had to come to terms with the dangers of his work as a military test pilot before he embarked on space missions."

Jeff absorbs the information, tilting his palms upwards in astonishment, and then makes a gesture of resignation. "The wives of astronauts played a vital, yet often unrecognised role in the space programme. They found themselves catapulted into a position of immense responsibility, having to be the rock that held their families together while their husbands were away; managing the household, paying bills and shielding their children from both the anxieties and the excessive attention their fathers received, all while preparing for the very real possibility that something could go terribly wrong."

From his office in London, Middleton speaks further. He says that a particularly revealing piece of footage clearly shows Marilyn Lovell's concerns at a press conference prior to the Apollo 13 flight. "In my opinion, Jim had become the most travelled person on the planet by then," he explains. "By the age of 42, a father of four, he had amassed more flight hours than all the Russian cosmonauts combined. In 1965, he'd spent two weeks in space on the Gemini 7 mission. Three years later, he'd journeyed closer to the Moon on the Apollo 8 mission. Unfortunately, on this footage, it's clear that Marilyn had serious reservations about his fourth space mission. She believed he was taking an awful risk and her concern is evident on her face."

Jeff Lovell concurs that the scene is one of the most emotive moments in the documentary. "There's mum, putting on a brave face, saying she's 'Happy, proud and thrilled'. But the camera, zooming in on her eyes, hints at what's really going on inside her head. It's as though it's saying, 'She's not as calm as all that.' You sense she's keen for it all to be over."

As the youngest of the Lovell children, Jeff, who has spent three decades working as a pharmaceutical sales representative for Pfizer, has only fragmented memories of his father's time in space. He mentions that in 1965, his mother concealed the onset of her pregnancy from his father, worried that it would jeopardise his NASA career. "Dad was scheduled to fly on Gemini 7, so she kept the news of her pregnancy under wraps for five months and made a concerted effort to hide her condition. She assumed that a personal issue like this would see him cancelled from the mission."

Jeff chuckles and remarks, "I'm not sure if this is a line from a film or a genuine response, but I reckon my dad's reply was simply, 'Wake me up when this nightmare is over!'". Ultimately, when the couple informed Nasa of the pregnancy, their response was: "Marilyn, if you're able to cope, then we'll proceed as normal." Jeff was born just two weeks after his father's maiden spaceflight.

This is his recollection of Apollo 13. "I don't recall being at the launch, but I do remember the media presence and that there were people at our house when I was four or five years old. In addition to journalists and television cameras, the wives of the other Apollo astronauts also visited our home. "I saw it as just another time I'd experience my dad doing his job as a public servant, with many people admiring and being curious. Being given a Moon rock was more fascinating to me, and I was disheartened when I didn't receive one."

Jeff attributes both his youthful disposition and his mother's resolute resilience in "keeping things normal" for enabling her to shield him from any apprehension that his father might perish in space. "It never crossed my mind that he could be lost forever. On the other hand, my older siblings were thoroughly conscious of the possibility of losing him, and they did carry that fear."

Susan, the third youngest of the Lovell children, shudders when recounting her own memories of her father's most notorious mission. "I was 11 years old at the time," she says (she's now 66). The explosion that caused damage to Apollo 13 happened overnight while she was asleep, and her mother had called Nasa to ask how much to tell her children about it in the morning. "We had these 'squawk boxes' all over the house," she recalls, referring to the bulkier Bakelite radios that continually broadcast communications between the astronauts and their team at mission control.

“Mm, she says, bursting into tears immediately. 'The television news said there was just a one in twenty chance that my dad and the others would make it. I was devastated. A lady from my mum's friend came into the room, took me by the hand and took me home.'” After that, the Lovell children remained at home until their father returned to Earth.

It was like I knew what was going on," Susan says. "She probably went running upstairs with her Bible. Our house had a split-level layout, and there was a spot on the stairs where I could sit and watch what was happening. It was the same spot where I had sat to watch Christmas delivering my presents, and suddenly I was watching the local church pastor giving communion to all those astronauts' wives by the coffee table." She says this was when it really sunk in. "I rushed down the stairs past all those women and outside to the picnic bench. My mum came out and I said, 'Dad's going to die!' She said: 'Dad's too stubborn to die.' I said 'Dad's not stubborn!' but she explained that by 'stubborn' she meant 'strong'. My mum never allowed herself to think he might not make it.

According to Susan, it seems Marilyn has shown she had the right temperament to manage the pressures of being an astronaut's wife. How did she truly feel about being put in the public eye or associating with royalty and dignitaries? "She clearly enjoyed it," confirms Susan. "Kings, queens and popes! She was unfamiliar with formal protocol, so she would observe and mimic others; she excelled at that." In 1969, the Lovells were invited to the White House by the Nixons. "She had a amusing anecdote about sneaking away with Pat Nixon to the presidential suite bathroom for a cigarette. She also met the Queen Mother. As soon as they were in private, she requested a beer, just like a normal person. Mum love it all."

Susan says with a chuckle, "The Lovells being the picture-perfect American family was all just an illusion, to be honest."

Above the Earth, Jim Lovell suspected he and his colleagues were almost certainly doomed in the aftermath of the explosion, prompting Swigert to state calmly: “OK Houston, we’ve had a problem here”, followed by a grim confirmation from Lovell: “Ah, Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Jeff claims that the 1995 film is "quite accurate by Hollywood standards" but also states that Ron Howard took some creative liberties with the characterisation of Swigert. Swigert passed away in 1982, at a relatively young age of 51. Skirting the facts, Howard portrayed Swigert as an inexperienced pilot struggling during the crisis. However, Jeff corrects this perception, highlighting that Swigert, actually played a key role in preparing the command module's emergency procedures manual. With his extensive knowledge, it can be argued that no one was more suitable for the task than Swigert.

He tells me that his father drew on his boy-scout training to remain calm and composed during the crisis. “His parents had parted when he was very young and then his dad passed away when he was five. He looked to the scouting leaders as makeshift father figures and they had taught him to 'be prepared' and direct his attention to solving problems rather than panicking.” Susan says her father told her that he stayed level-headed under those extraordinary circumstances by “handling the situation like a game of cards. He mentioned to me that 'we simply kept playing the next card and focused on that. There wasn't a moment when we didn't have another card to play. If that had happened then we might have given up’.”

Down at mission control, medics had instructed the crew to try and get some rest during their journey back home, but Susan told me that "they didn't sleep for four days - they couldn't. But incredibly, their thinking didn't become cloudy." Both she and Jeff comment on the remarkable scene in the new documentary showing how their father had to calculate the navigational data using only a pencil and paper before asking the men at mission control to check his arithmetic using their slide rules.

"It was an absolutely wonderful example of that kind of old-school rocket science, wasn't it?" marvels Middleton. "I reckon there's more computing power in the software for the mouse on your desk than they had in the whole of Nasa's mainframe for the Apollo expeditions." As well as capturing the "personal drama and insight" of the Apollo 13 mission, Middleton hopes to remind a new generation of the bigger lessons gained during the space programme of the 1960s and 1970s. "It was a particularly trying time back on Earth during those missions," he says.

The Cold War and Vietnam. However, when those initial astronauts ventured into space, they perceived the Earth as a limited source of life with no geographical boundaries or divisions. In their own words, although they originally set out to reach the Moon, they ended up discovering the Earth. Those early missions led to the first significant legislation aimed at addressing biodiversity loss and pollution, concerns that have increased in importance with time. Now, with the Artemis missions scheduled to send astronauts back into orbit around the Moon next year, we are on the cusp of embarking on a third era of space exploration. It's more crucial than ever to hold onto the vision of the Earth from a distance.

Both the Lovell children concur. Although several astronauts, including Swigert, went into politics after leaving Nasa, the Lovells claim that their father turned down invitations to "enter a world that might have led him astray, tore him apart, although people adored him and he could have made a fantastic leader". Following his departure from the space programme, he attended Harvard Business School, worked as a motivational speaker and subsequently ran a restaurant, where his eldest son, James Lovell III, took charge of the kitchen.

Although Jeff and Susan are dismayed by the emerging anti-scientific movement, including so-called Moon-landing conspiracy theorists and the growing community of Flat Earthers, they remark that "we have a family rule never to discuss politics". However, they do feel that an outraged globe could benefit from adopting the consistent, rational thought and teamwork displayed by the Apollo astronauts.

Jeff says his father's catchphrase is: "We can sit around banging our heads against a brick wall for 10 minutes. But when that's done, we'll still have the same problems. So, let's just get on and do what we can while we can. Let's do our best to last as long as possible without dwelling on the final outcome." He also mentions that during the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters, when approached by journalists for comment, his father remained composed, saying: "No, we can't stop the space programme. Those who lost their lives knew and accepted the risks. We must continue to push forward."

At 96, Jim Lovell says he's "slowed down a great deal", but both he and his sister make a concerted effort to keep him active. Susan, who previously worked as an executive assistant, took on the role of Jim's personal assistant following the pandemic. Jim's nephew, Jeff, has also been looking out for him, recently signing up as a volunteer tour guide at the Johnson Space Center in Houston ("I thought: I can probably bring a bit of insight here…"). Jeff keeps Jim occupied with "small projects and outings. I took him back to his old High School recently and all his memories of meeting his mum came flooding back."

Although Jeff has many fond memories of playing with his father's space memorabilia as a child, "I even wore one of his space suits to science fiction day at secondary school and enjoyed longingly trying on his space helmet with all its various settings", most of it has now been donated to museums.

Susan continues to hold onto the mink coat given to Marilyn by Jim for his 1968 Christmas in space. Bought by Jim as a gift, it was delivered to the doorstep with a romantic message, "with love from the man in the Moon". "Some people refer to it as the most romantic gift in history," she says. She admits that she cannot wear the coat now, but would love to have it displayed alongside her father's space suit at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

As he's leaving, Jeff brings up another gift his father had given his mother: "He named a peak on the Moon 'Mount Marilyn'. Neil Armstrong reportedly used it as a reference point when he landed on the Moon in 1969." Jeff offers a smile. "Dad never managed to go to the Moon himself. However, we finally had that name officially registered in 2017... so he's now immortalised adjacent to the Sea of Tranquility, alongside the moonlanded with Neil Armstrong.

"Apollo 13: Survival" is now available to stream on Netflix from 5th September

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