Apollo 13 may be the most well known Apollo mission, save for the first lunar landing mission, Apollo 11. It included a crew of three, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise. It was also conceived to be a lunar landing, but that part of the proposed mission was aborted after two days into the flight when an explosion of an oxygen tank damaged the service module. The flight had launched on April 11, 1970 from Cape Kennedy. It was the seventh manned mission of the Apollo series and was intended to be the third to have included a lunar landing.
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Apollo Program: Missions 7, 8, 9 and 10
On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University in Houston. His speech included these famous words, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” (1) This was a challenge that some felt could be achieved but NASA had been working to develop the building blocks to get there.
NASA Comes to Texas
In the 1960s, the expansion of the United States space program was rightfully associated with President Kennedy. However, it had begun during the presidential terms of President Eisenhower. In January of 1960, President Eisenhower urged Congress to give a new civilian space agency full responsibility for the development of nonmilitary space exploration. This article is intended to be an overview of the early days of the space program in Texas. We would like to expand on this topic as we find more information.
TEXAS HISTORY NOTEBOOK 