Houston, we've had a problem
At 10:06 pm om April 13, 1970, NASA mission control received an ominous message from the crew of Apollo 13, the third mission designed to land humans on the moon.
Jack Swigert: OK, Houston, we've had a problem here.
Mission Control: This is Houston. Say again, please.
Jim Lovell: Houston, we've had a problem.
One of the spacecraft's two oxygen tanks had exploded. The explosion caused the other tank and all of the fuel cells to fail. Apollo 13 was four days from home with no air, no electricity and no water.
The crew was forced to shut down the command module completely and to use the lunar module as a "lifeboat". This situation had been suggested during an earlier training simulation, but had not been considered a likely scenario. Without the lunar module the accident would certainly have been fatal.
Because Apollo 13 followed the free-return trajectory, its altitude over the lunar far side was approximately 100 km (60 mi) greater than the orbital altitude on the remaining Apollo lunar missions. Due to this fact, Apollo 13 holds the absolute altitude record for a manned spacecraft, reaching a distance of 400,171 kilometers (248,655 mi) from Earth.
President Nixon awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the crew and the Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team for their actions during the mission.