As the world waits with bated breath to see what will happen to astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been stuck in space since June 6 of this year, Netflix has dropped a documentary that will make for some uneasy watching.
Apollo 13: Survival, which landed on Netflix on September 5, is a major new documentary about one of the scariest and most dangerous manned space flights in history.
Directed by the Bafta-nominated director Peter Middleton, it tells the story of how, after launching from the Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970, one of the shuttle’s oxygen tanks ruptured, its life-support and electrical systems became disabled, and for a while the astronauts lost complete contact with Earth. This meant that the team, made up of commander Jim Lovell, command module pilot Jack Swigert, and lunar module pilot Fred Haise, had to abort their mission to land on the moon and even faced death in space.
To tell this captivating and terrifying story, which thankfully ended with the crew landing safely on Earth on 17 April, 1970, the documentary uses the complete audio recordings of the team. In fact, the director opted for no on-camera interviews in order to keep the facts as they were at the time of the mission, rather than being based on memories.
Speaking about the documentary, Lovell, who is now 96, said: “I am grateful the world now has this excellent documentary showing the raw emotions and triumph we felt back then. My hope is our experience in space will continue to inspire new heights of exploration for many years to come.”