Apollo 13 spacecraft?

Question

did it land on the moon or did the explosion cause it not to?

when did it land back on earth?

Answer 1

No, the Apollo 13 mission did not land on the moon. After the explosion, it was immediately clear to everyone involved that the only thing to do was try to get back to Earth as soon and safe as possible. All thoughts about landing on the Moon were forgotten.

The explosion damaged the Service Module, resulting in a loss of oxygen and electrical power. The crew used the Lunar Module as a “lifeboat” in space. The command module systems remained functional, but were deactivated to preserve the vehicle's capability to reenter Earth’s atmosphere.

Check out the movie "Apollo 13" from your library.

Answer 2

Apollo 13 did not land on the Moon. The landing was cancelled when the accident happened.
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If the explosion had happened while the lunar module was on the Moon all of the men would have surely died. Without the intact lunar module and it fuel and life support the men would not have made it back alive.
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Answer 3

The explosion happened before it landed on the moon. They had to abort that part of the mission so they could work on a way of getting back home

Answer 4

The explosion caused it not to. The explosion happened while it was already on a trajectory that would take it close to the moon, so they decided to swing around the back side of the moon and then come on home.

Answer 5

it did not land on the moon because of the explosion

Answer 6

It had to abort the lunar landing due to the results of the explosion.

Answer 7

Did NOT land on the moon.
Rent the movie, it's very well done, entertaining, and quite historically accurate.

Answer 8

Never landed and almost did not make it back to Earth. They had to fix the flux capacitor with an astronaut diaper.

Answer 9

Apoll13 was unable to land due to explosion because of the malfunction.
The Apollo 13 malfunction was caused by an explosion and rupture of oxygen tank no. 2 in the service module. The explosion ruptured a line or damaged a valve in the no. 1 oxygen tank, causing it to lose oxygen rapidly. The service module bay no.4 cover was blown off. All oxygen stores were lost within about 3 hours, along with loss of water, electrical power, and use of the propulsion system.
When a tank full of liquid oxygen inside Apollo 13s service module ruptured with a muffled bang, engineers and technicians at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) could hear the tone in Lovells problem report and wasted no time jumping into action.

"I think within an hour or two we had just about all of our people in. And it went fast," recalled Guenter Wendt, who served as the leader of the launch pad teams at Florida's Kennedy Space Center. Wendt's thick German accent and staunch demeanor prompted the Original Mercury Seven astronauts to nickname him the "Pad Fuhrer."

"Everyone started looking at data," remembered Wendt, "and saying Where could it be? How could it be? and What can we do?" At the time of Apollo 13 Wendt was working for North American Rockwell, the prime contractor for the Apollo command and service modules, which were crippled by the explosion.

There was the possibility that something hadn't been done correctly at KSC in preparing Apollo 13 for its mission. However, neither Wendt nor his colleagues wanted to believe they were at fault, and no one wasted any time doing so.

Wendt told SPACE.com that once the emergency began, he didn't have time to dwell on the emotions of the moment. "You don't think so much as to how do you feel or what it means. You have a job."

The Cause of the Accident:::::
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It was two months before NASA was satisfied that the causes of the accident were understood. As Lovell later wrote, the accident did not have a single cause but, rather, was the result of an "accumulation of human errors and technical anomalies that doomed...[the mission]." The accident began, in fact, in 1965 when the design engineers decided to change the spacecraft power supplies from 28 to 65 volts. Normally, of course, such a change would cause a cascade of other changes as designers adapted their particular components to the new operating environment. However, the people building the innards of the Service Module oxygen tanks somehow never became consciously aware of the change. Each of the tanks contained a stirring fan, a heating element, and a temperature-sensitive switch designed to shut everything off if the element got hotter than about 25 degrees centigrade (80 F) and none of these components was ever redesigned to accommodate the higher voltage. NASA might have gotten away with the design flaw (as it had on Apollos 7 through 12 ) if one of the oxygen tanks destined to fly on Apollo 13 hadn't been damaged in 1968. This particular tank had originally been installed in the Apollo 10 CSM but, prior to that mission, was removed for modification. At some point, the tank was dropped about 5 cm (two inches) and because of its very thin walls, suffered noticeable damage. Another tank was installed in Apollo 10 while the original was set aside for repair and eventual installation in the Apollo 13 spacecraft. Tests run on the tank after the repairs indicated proper functioning but, in the weeks preceding the Apollo 13 launch, ground crews experienced significant difficulties draining it. In hindsight, it was at this point that NASA should have taken a hard look at the health of the tank but instead, all of the cognizant individuals - the crew included - concluded that the problem was not serious. Replacement of the tank would have delayed the mission - by a month at least - and, at the time, it seemed acceptable to try emptying the tank by running the internal heater for several hours. No one imagined just how serious a problem the procedure would cause.

As we now know, the temperature-sensitive switch was not designed to operate at 65 volts. During normal operations, the heater was on for only brief periods and the switch never opened. However, during what proved to be a lengthy process of emptying the tank using the internal heater, the switch opened but, then, was immediately welded shut again by an electric arc driven by the high voltage. Indications that the switch had closed were missed. Subsequently, whenever the CSM was powered up, the heaters went into operation without the protection normally provided by the switch; and, at some point during pre-launch activities, the whole assembly reached a temperature of over 500 degrees Centigrade (1000 F). This was a high enough temperature to cause severe damage to the Teflon insulation protecting the fan-motor wiring and, as the Apollo 13 Review Board later concluded, "from that time on the oxygen tank was in a hazardous condition when filled with oxygen and electrically powered." The stage was set for the accident.

Despite all the rattling that must have gone on during the launch and subsequent engine firings, nothing untoward happened inside the tank until fifty-five hours, fifty-five minutes into the mission. At that moment, at a quiet time and, undoubtedly as a result of something so simple as the start up of the fan, the wires arced and the insulation caught fire. It was the 1967 Apollo launch-pad fire all over again, only this time it was a fire fed by a superabundance of pure oxygen, a fire that wouldn't quickly go out. The heat of the fire began boiling the liquid oxygen that mostly filled the tank and the pressure began to rise. Within a half minute, the pressure was too high for the tank's thin walls and they burst. The explosion wreaked havoc throughout the innards of the Service Module, rupturing the other oxygen tank and blowing out the side of the spacecraft.

From a purely engineering point of view, the Apollo 13 accident didn't reveal any fundamental flaws in the Apollo design concept. In any project of such size and complexity, unforeseen problems are to be expected and, what the accident did was to underline the lessons of the Apollo fire: NASA needed to do a better job of identifying problems before they could happen. The agency needed to conduct another thorough review of designs and procedures, particularly with regard to components that came in contact with the oxygen supply and, in the future, to pay closer attention to design changes, manufacturing quality, and the implications of anomalous test data. But there was no need to go back to square one. From an engineering point of view, once the problem had been identified, the fixes were easily accomplished. True, the accident had cost NASA one of its now limited opportunities to complete a landing and had almost cost the lives of three astronauts; but when measured in terms of the engineering goals that had been set in the early sixties, NASA was still well ahead of the game.

The main trouble with such accidents is that they have the potential of causing real political mischief. Although the death warrant for Apollo had already been signed in January 1970 - with the assembly lines shutdown and one of the remaining missions cut from the schedule for lack of funds - it is not coincidental that two more missions were dropped in the interval following the accident. Congressional support for Apollo had been weak for years and now there was a new President who was less than an ardent fan; and, while prediction of the political impact of serious accidents is far from an exact science, any accident was bound to raise questions about the credibility of NASA and its programs. As both the Apollo fire and the Challenger accident of the Shuttle era indicate, serious accidents do not necessarily doom a program but, given the expense and high visibility of such enterprises, the political risks are considerable.

Answer 10

The movie was actually fairly realistic in what happened.

A little dramatic license, though...

A rarity in Hollyweird these days...