The LuLac Edition #4,259, April 13th, 2020

APOLLO 13 @ 50

Fifty years go today, at St. John the Evangelist High School in Pittston, Father John Manno didn’t bring his reel to reel tape recorder to our Religion class. Something was up. There was no loud, boisterous greeting to begin the class. He was sober and quiet.
Father Manno used pop music at the time to hone in his religious message to us. Songs like “Sweet Cherry Wine”, “Crystal Blue Persuasion “ and “I Started A Joke” where played at the start of the class. Then Manno used the lyrics to teach scripture which for me at least, was quite effective.
But on that day, Father Manno announced that the crew of Apollo 13 was in trouble. He asked us to prayer. He wqas deadly serious. The next few days transfixed America and the world.
Here’s an article Kim Jones from The Verge on how NASA and the world remembers.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 13 mission that never made it to the moon, the one where Commander Jim Lovell uttered the phrase “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” NASA calls the mission a “successful failure,” because even though an explosion crippled the primary spacecraft two days in, Lovell and fellow crewmembers Fred Haise and Jack Swigert returned safely to Earth thanks to the determined work of the ground crew at Mission Control.
NASA isn’t planning in-person activities to commemorate the event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but has released a documentary with archival footage from the mission. Apollo 13: Home Safe includes interviews with Lovell (it opens with him saying “it was plagued by bad omens and bad luck from the very beginning...”) and conversations with Haise, NASA flight directors Gene Kranz and Glynn Lunney and engineer Hank Rotter. Swigert died in 1982. NASA has other social media activities planned as well.
A website called Apollo 13 in Real Time, the creation of Ben Feist, a contractor at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, is providing transcripts, video footage, and audio recordings from the mission posted at the times they occurred 50 years ago, including every word spoken by the astronauts on the mission. Much of the audio was digitized for the first time for this project.
And if you want to watch Ron Howard’s dramatic retelling of the mission (and you definitely should, it’s great for kids), his 1995 film Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks as Lovell, is available on Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Google Play and iTunes.
Locally here are two stories from The Scranton Times provided by Rusty Fender’s Facebook page. 

The second article highlights Glynn Lunney’s role. is a retired NASA engineer. An employee of NASA since its creation in 1958, Lunney was a flight director during the Gemini and Apollo programs, and was on duty during historic events such as the Apollo 11 lunar ascent and the pivotal hours of the Apollo 13 crisis. At the end of the Apollo program, he became manager of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first collaboration in spaceflight between the United States and the Soviet Union. Later, he served as manager of the Space Shuttle program before leaving NASA in 1985 and later becoming a vice president of the United Space Alliance.
Lunney was a key figure in the US manned space program from Project Mercury through the coming of the Space Shuttle. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the National Space Trophy, which he was given by the Rotary Club in 2005. Chris Kraft, NASA's first flight director, described Lunney as "a true hero of the space age", saying that he was "one of the outstanding contributors to the exploration of space of the last four decades".
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