One of my earliest memories was being woken up by my parents when I was 6 to watch the Apollo 11 moonwalk. I was fascinated by Apollo and still am and i remember Apollo 13 vividly - strangely, one of the things I remember so well was a cartoon in a British newspaper - it was probably The Mirror or The Sun - but I'll never forget the cartoon. It showed the Apollo 13 spacecraft returning from the moon - and in the background there's these ghosts of Columbus, Magellan, Cook, etc - the great explorers - the cartoon caption was "Come on boys, we're all pulling for you"
Nice to see this after watching the movie. Note in the movie, In the film, Lovell has a cameo as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the naval vessel which led the operation to recover the Apollo 13 astronauts after their successful splashdown. Lovell can be seen as the naval officer shaking Hanks' hand, as Hanks speaks in voice-over, in the scene in which the astronauts come aboard the Iwo Jima.
I remember aged 9 running home from school (Hathershaw Juniors in Oldham) to see if they got home. My mum and I watched this very programme and cried with joy when we heard the astronauts after re-entry. I remember running up and down the stairs because of joy and relief and thumping the air.
The Dunkirk of spaceflight. Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat by professionals with skills so good they were virtually superhuman. thanks for uploading this. Loved it!
Great to hear the commentary from the voice of a then-young James Burke. His groundbreaking science documentary entitled ‘Connections’ should be a part of every secondary school curriculum.
Totally love the fact that they didn't fill in any of the Dead air time with chatter just quiet contemplation. Today's so-called news reporters could take lessons!!
The tension on their faces is quite evident with even crossed fingers on display. The relief when that capsule with parachutes deployed became visible must have been exhilirating after all the dramatic moments since the explosion 3 days earler with one problem after another cropping up in the struggle to bring these men back alive.
My father actually observed the technical data of the early Apollo missions as part of his job. He once told me that there were so many mechanical issues on those space flights it is remarkable accidents like Apollo 13 and Apollo 1 were not the norm.
The story of this incredible rescue mission gets to me every time. Everyone of the crew and mission control are heroes but Commander Lovell is my all time Hero
I was too young to remember Apollo 13 (Apollo 15 - 17 were the only moon missions I remember clearly), however my mother says the bit of the BBC Apollo 13 re-entry coverage she remembers clearly was James Burke with his fingers crossed. This footage shows it clearly. Thanks for posting it.
RIP Cliff Michelmore. We watched this live on the school's only TV, I've always wondered how our teachers would have explained it to a class of 8 year-olds had it all gone wrong.
Thank you SO much for posting this footage. I can vividly remember sitting at home with my family (I think it must have been school holidays) watching this; the image of James Burke with his fingers crossed. The tension of not knowing if they had survived re-entry or if the heat shield had been damaged by the explosion. I know radio blackout was only a few seconds longer than expected, but at that time every second felt like an hour. On a slightly different note, compare the clothes the BBC team are wearing here to those from the clip a few days before when James Burke was talking about what the crew would need to do to get home; then it was light grey suit and psychedelic tie; here dark suits and sombre ties. Whether a conscious/unconscious decision from each of them or an edict from the BBC, they were prepared to give the worst news if things had gone wrong.
over the last 2 weeks, i watched this video over and over, i was just over 2 years old when the apollo 13 disaster occured.... now i see why more and more everyday the Brits are our closeness ally...u guys rock...the great vid...
A rare moment in time when the people of the world put aside their differences and were united in the desire to bring these brave astronauts home safely
that was a jim lovell responding. the most touching scene. i searched stuff about the appolo 13 over internet 5, 6 years ago. i never find this. thanks for uploading this.
Nice to see this footage in its entirety again. BBC usually show it edited down quite a bit. BBC started broadcasting colour TV in 1967 but right through to the mid 1970s they still broadcasted the odd B & W programme.
I've just watched the Netflix documentary And part of the BBC coverage programme comes up in glorious colour It looks like it was Filmed yesterday I thought perhaps they had a look alike Patrick Moore and it was dramatised but nope it's the real thing It's even a woman director calling the shots on the studio floor She looks like she's walked out of 1940
I never paid attention to the US space program until the Challenger tragedy so I watched the movie not knowing the ending... Ron Howard did a great job.
I know a guy that was in the navy back in the day and was on the aircraft carrier that picked up Apollo 11. He was standing just a few feet away when the astronauts got out of the capsule... I'm really jealous :)
@penguinsix There was Cliff Mitchemore journalist (opening the clip), James Burke, a science expert, Patrick Moore who is an amateur astronomer and is now aged 87 and still presents The Sky at Night which has been airing on the first sunday of the month for 53 years, plus some other experts
Lovell tightened his straps, the other two mimicked. "Hold on, if this is going to be anything like Apollo 8 this could be rough." said Lovell, But it was nothing like Apollo 8 as Apollo 13's command module sliced smoothly into the South Pacific Ocean.
I was in 7th grade at the time and skipped school that Friday so I could watch live coverage of this event (which began around 5:30 AM where I lived). My teachers gladly accepted my excuse for missing school.
My dad wrote the excuse note for me and stated I was watching history in the making. I think that was the main selling point in getting my teachers to gladly accept my excuse.
Little story here. This was a great movie and going to the moon or any spaceflight is never routine but Ron Howard took many liberties with making this film. My Uncle worked in Huntsville for NASA from the Gemini through the early space shuttle days. He spent lots of time in Houston and Florida as well as Redstone. he said they left no stone unturned but you just didn't know how the vacumn of space, deviations in temperature, radiation and pressure would affect the hardware and materials. No mission was ever flawless. However, in this film they state that using the LEM as a "lifeboat" had never been simulated was not true. This had been practiced and there were procedures in place for this very occurrence. He also said the greatest fear was not having enough power to get home because they turned all power off but the biggest fear was the astronauts freezing to death due to shutting down the power for so long. Also, when the words Houston we have a problem that Lovell said came out that is actually Jack Swigert and he said Houston, we've had a problem. The fear of damage to the heat shield was authentic though. In the movie the 2 minutes passed and went another few minutes with radio blackout. That didn't happen. The crew came out of radio blackout pretty much when they were supposed to and NASA was monitoring the re-entry so close they saw no indication from the data that there would be any problem with chute deployment. NASA was also monitoring the crews vital signs and other than raised blood pressure saw no indication that the crew was anything but fine. Once the drobes were deployed they knew the main chutes would be fine because if the drobes were destroyed the main chutes would be also. The carbon dioxide filter problem had also been simulated before Apollo 8 so there were procedures in place for that already as well. All in all a great movie but not totally accurate.
China HAS built something. They got several Taikonauts in space and a small space station. UK has invented highly efficient rocket engines that may make SSTOs possible, and Japan has done a lot of stuff as well. Capsules are better than space planes for a simple reason: First rule of Engineering: Keep it simple.
Not sure what was going through ron howard's head when he chose to go with altering the sequence of events of how apollo 13 came out of reentry. The drama could have focused on whether or not the chutes would deploy or not. That's when it seemed to be the moment when the collective sigh of relief actually occurred and it would have been just as good if not better. Ah well. P.S. respect to the british broadcaster's coverage here, skillfully done play by play commentary
@lunarmodule5 The last time I saw this we were all sat round the old black & white tv (still did not have a colour set). Where did you find this? It looked like it has been kept on an ancient VHS hence the poor quality. Thanks for uploading, brings back happy memories of those heady times when it seemed the whole world held its breath.
they're lucky the explosion from the CSM didn't damage the heat shield. after all they were coming in at 24000mph. how bad of shape was 13 in? what were the chances of the parachutes not deploying?
+derek wall Their velocity was about right for a lunar mission. The fastest re-entry capsule ever was actually Apollo 10, 36,360 feet per second or about 40,000 km/h. The Apollo command module was designed to land safely on just two of its three parachutes. They also "skipped" to a higher altitude and re-entered a second time in order to spread out the thermal load. The re-entry was one of the few things on Apollo 13 that went by the book. :P
@pt1gard My guess is that the uploader got hold of an ancient VHS tape which would have deteriorated over the years and has not converted to digital all that well. I watched this at the time and the quality was quite good even by todays standards. But the quality here is not that important, the uploader is showing a bit of history as it happened, not entering into some silly hoax debate.
Ever stuck your hand out of a car window doing 70 on a highway? It gets blown back quite a bit dosn't it. Now imagine doing that at 25000 mph - thats how hard the capsule is decelerated (5 x gravity at its peak). The CM hits the air so hard it gets turned into plasma (which is what causes the radio blackout). Obviously that kind of speed would snap a parachute right off. So they don't even get deployed untill the capsule has slowed to a few hundred mph.
Now imagine trying to land a glider that’s still traveling over 200mph when you touch down, coming in over twice as steep as a commercial jet,and there were no go arounds. The shuttle went very fast but not quite as fast as a returning moon ship. Still, the plasma was what doomed Columbia
For sure I don't want this for nobody, but I still doubt that next spaceships generation will perform that well in emergency cases as Apollo did. And I feel that perform is there in this case thanks to Grissom, White and Chaffee.
Doubt it, Quality will not be HD or anything like that as UK TV at the time were either 405 line monochome or 625 line 50 Hz PAL 25 FPS Colour format. Video Capture of 625 line film (which is also interlaced) only gives a quite small resolution image (smaller than 400 x 300 pixels). Enlargement will lead to Webcam type quality. Plus the original footage from the US navy recovery forces were filmed in NTSC 60Hz 29 FPS format which would have had to be processed through an analogue scan converter before it could be shown on UK TV.
The camera seems to temporarily pan away from the CM as the main chutes are streaming. Was this to avoid exposing the TV public to the doomsday scenario of an unsurviveable impact with the Pacific had all 3 `mains` failed due to damage?
This was a bigger achievement than the moon landing and my favorite Apollo mission. Amazing they got them back alive.
One of my earliest memories was being woken up by my parents when I was 6 to watch the Apollo 11 moonwalk.
I was fascinated by Apollo and still am and i remember Apollo 13 vividly - strangely, one of the things I remember so well was a cartoon in a British newspaper - it was probably The Mirror or The Sun - but I'll never forget the cartoon. It showed the Apollo 13 spacecraft returning from the moon - and in the background there's these ghosts of Columbus, Magellan, Cook, etc - the great explorers - the cartoon caption was "Come on boys, we're all pulling for you"
RIP Cliff Michelmore, 96. One of the outstanding broadcasters of the generation.
Nice to see this after watching the movie. Note in the movie, In the film, Lovell has a cameo as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the naval vessel which led the operation to recover the Apollo 13 astronauts after their successful splashdown. Lovell can be seen as the naval officer shaking Hanks' hand, as Hanks speaks in voice-over, in the scene in which the astronauts come aboard the Iwo Jima.
I remember aged 9 running home from school (Hathershaw Juniors in Oldham) to see if they got home. My mum and I watched this very programme and cried with joy when we heard the astronauts after re-entry. I remember running up and down the stairs because of joy and relief and thumping the air.
The Dunkirk of spaceflight. Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat by professionals with skills so good they were virtually superhuman.
thanks for uploading this. Loved it!
Great to hear the commentary from the voice of a then-young James Burke. His groundbreaking science documentary entitled ‘Connections’ should be a part of every secondary school curriculum.
Captured the tension so well. These guys really cared.
Totally love the fact that they didn't fill in any of the Dead air time with chatter just quiet contemplation. Today's so-called news reporters could take lessons!!
The tension on their faces is quite evident with even crossed fingers on display. The relief when that capsule with parachutes deployed became visible must have been exhilirating after all the dramatic moments since the explosion 3 days earler with one problem after another cropping up in the struggle to bring these men back alive.
My father actually observed the technical data of the early Apollo missions as part of his job. He once told me that there were so many mechanical issues on those space flights it is remarkable accidents like Apollo 13 and Apollo 1 were not the norm.
The story of this incredible rescue mission gets to me every time. Everyone of the crew and mission control are heroes but Commander Lovell is my all time Hero
I too remember watching this as a child. The relief when we saw the chutes. Apollo really did make us feel like the world was one in those days.
I was too young to remember Apollo 13 (Apollo 15 - 17 were the only moon missions I remember clearly), however my mother says the bit of the BBC Apollo 13 re-entry coverage she remembers clearly was James Burke with his fingers crossed. This footage shows it clearly. Thanks for posting it.
You are most welcome
David Keenan
two words - you're welcome!
Reminds me of the great friendship between the UK and the USA.....God bless the UK
Much appreciated my friend
RIP Cliff Michelmore. We watched this live on the school's only TV, I've always wondered how our teachers would have explained it to a class of 8 year-olds had it all gone wrong.
What a moment that was. NASA's finest hour, Gene Krantz said. I wont argue with him.
with the camera capturing alot of violence in our history, it's good to see something like this once in awhile
Even now watching it made me cry
It’s nice to see that the world came together on these space missions. The successes were successes for the world at large.
Thank you SO much for posting this footage. I can vividly remember sitting at home with my family (I think it must have been school holidays) watching this; the image of James Burke with his fingers crossed. The tension of not knowing if they had survived re-entry or if the heat shield had been damaged by the explosion. I know radio blackout was only a few seconds longer than expected, but at that time every second felt like an hour.
On a slightly different note, compare the clothes the BBC team are wearing here to those from the clip a few days before when James Burke was talking about what the crew would need to do to get home; then it was light grey suit and psychedelic tie; here dark suits and sombre ties. Whether a conscious/unconscious decision from each of them or an edict from the BBC, they were prepared to give the worst news if things had gone wrong.
Great you picked up on that 💪🏼
Wow what a moment that must have been. So thrilling that even Brits got excited!!!
I remember this vividly, it was all anyone had talked about for days. This was one of the first moments the entire Earth was smiling and happy.
over the last 2 weeks, i watched this video over and over, i was just over 2 years old when the apollo 13 disaster occured.... now i see why more and more everyday the Brits are our closeness ally...u guys rock...the great vid...
I rememeber watching this live, I cannot put into words the tension that everyone felt.
I was in elementary school, and they brought us all into the auditorium and wheeled in a TV and we all watched this. No one really knew...
the movie was great....but the silence, black & white shots of people who really didn't know these men....very powerful.......nice posting......
@3:09- Is that James (Connections) Burke?! Awesome!
Yes, that's definitely James Burke.
Yes Sirrr! That was old of my all time favorite shows!
A rare moment in time when the people of the world put aside their differences and were united in the desire to bring these brave astronauts home safely
RETVRN to BBC announcers/narrators with excellent elocution.
I very distinctly remember watching this as it happened. Nobody knew if they were going to make it alive or not.
This was in COULOR too? GOD BLESS!
I remember patrick Moore as the space boffin when I was a boy watching the Saturn iv launch and splashdowns.where did the years go !
Paul Boulter he was brilliantly eccentric...I miss the guy
Saturn V
My mother remembers this. She says they brought in a TV to her classroom when they never had one before and made a point of watching it.
Thanks for uploading. Great stuff. Having now watched a few clips from British Apollo coverage, they were very good. Enthusiastic and knowledgeable.
50 Years Ago - Remember witching on a tiny B&W TV as a kid
Cool memory Tiger
that was a jim lovell responding. the most touching scene. i searched stuff about the appolo 13 over internet 5, 6 years ago. i never find this. thanks for uploading this.
How they made it back to Earth is a miracle of the 20th century
Nice to see this footage in its entirety again. BBC usually show it edited down quite a bit. BBC started broadcasting colour TV in 1967 but right through to the mid 1970s they still broadcasted the odd B & W programme.
EricIrl it's not quite the whole video, I have edited bits - someone else has posted the whole thing in parts on YTB - thanks for the comment
***** Thanks for the clarification. It's still the most complete edition of the splashdown coverage I've seen since 1970.
I've just watched the Netflix documentary And part of the BBC coverage programme comes up in glorious colour It looks like it was Filmed yesterday I thought perhaps they had a look alike Patrick Moore and it was dramatised but nope it's the real thing It's even a woman director calling the shots on the studio floor She looks like she's walked out of 1940
I never paid attention to the US space program until the Challenger tragedy so I watched the movie not knowing the ending... Ron Howard did a great job.
Imagine the families of these astronauts... what an emotional rollercoaster.
I love the shot of James Burke crossing his fingers. :)
I know a guy that was in the navy back in the day and was on the aircraft carrier that picked up Apollo 11. He was standing just a few feet away when the astronauts got out of the capsule... I'm really jealous :)
I was in third grade when this happened. I'll never forget the headline of the local newspaper "If Engine Fails, Astronauts Will Soar Past Earth".
Fantastic news coverage
@penguinsix There was Cliff Mitchemore journalist (opening the clip), James Burke, a science expert, Patrick Moore who is an amateur astronomer and is now aged 87 and still presents The Sky at Night which has been airing on the first sunday of the month for 53 years, plus some other experts
The discussions of using the LM as a lifeboat actually occurred in a meeting in 1965.....
Lovell tightened his straps, the other two mimicked. "Hold on, if this is going to be anything like Apollo 8 this could be rough." said Lovell, But it was nothing like Apollo 8 as Apollo 13's command module sliced smoothly into the South Pacific Ocean.
I was in 7th grade at the time and skipped school that Friday so I could watch live coverage of this event (which began around 5:30 AM where I lived). My teachers gladly accepted my excuse for missing school.
David Montgomery I doubt my teachers would have been so generous lol
My dad wrote the excuse note for me and stated I was watching history in the making. I think that was the main selling point in getting my teachers to gladly accept my excuse.
Approaching 150,000 views...thanks to all those who have watched this video and liked it.
I know someone who was in the TV studio that day (he was a technician for Marconi).
Thank you for posting this!
"Extremely loud applause at mission control."
--Camera pans to mission control and everybody's just standing around.
I'm watching the movie Apollo 13 now. Amazing!
Little story here. This was a great movie and going to the moon or any spaceflight is never routine but Ron Howard took many liberties with making this film. My Uncle worked in Huntsville for NASA from the Gemini through the early space shuttle days. He spent lots of time in Houston and Florida as well as Redstone. he said they left no stone unturned but you just didn't know how the vacumn of space, deviations in temperature, radiation and pressure would affect the hardware and materials. No mission was ever flawless. However, in this film they state that using the LEM as a "lifeboat" had never been simulated was not true. This had been practiced and there were procedures in place for this very occurrence. He also said the greatest fear was not having enough power to get home because they turned all power off but the biggest fear was the astronauts freezing to death due to shutting down the power for so long. Also, when the words Houston we have a problem that Lovell said came out that is actually Jack Swigert and he said Houston, we've had a problem. The fear of damage to the heat shield was authentic though. In the movie the 2 minutes passed and went another few minutes with radio blackout. That didn't happen. The crew came out of radio blackout pretty much when they were supposed to and NASA was monitoring the re-entry so close they saw no indication from the data that there would be any problem with chute deployment. NASA was also monitoring the crews vital signs and other than raised blood pressure saw no indication that the crew was anything but fine. Once the drobes were deployed they knew the main chutes would be fine because if the drobes were destroyed the main chutes would be also. The carbon dioxide filter problem had also been simulated before Apollo 8 so there were procedures in place for that already as well. All in all a great movie but not totally accurate.
THANKS FOR THIS GREAT FOOTAGE
FIRST CLASS LANDING SAFE
Thank you SO much. Im doing a project in my social studies class and this was my last minute thought. lol THANK YOU AGAIN!!
Excellent!
jolly good show
You are very welcome.
Awesome times...
Nice video.
@2:40 Bless his little heart, finger crossed. :)
That's exactly what I've been telling everyone since this flight.
Great upload thank You :)
Everyone loves a happy ending
This was a TV transmission from a ship on the ocean. Not a "movie".
43 years ago today
China HAS built something. They got several Taikonauts in space and a small space station. UK has invented highly efficient rocket engines that may make SSTOs possible, and Japan has done a lot of stuff as well. Capsules are better than space planes for a simple reason: First rule of Engineering: Keep it simple.
That's James Burke not Buke. From the TV series "Connections"
amended thanks!
Not sure what was going through ron howard's head when he chose to go with altering the sequence of events of how apollo 13 came out of reentry.
The drama could have focused on whether or not the chutes would deploy or not. That's when it seemed to be the moment when the collective sigh of relief actually occurred and it would have been just as good if not better.
Ah well.
P.S. respect to the british broadcaster's coverage here, skillfully done play by play commentary
His greatest mistake was not Casting Kevin Costner in the role of Jim Lovell Tom Hanks made sure of that
@lunarmodule5
The last time I saw this we were all sat round the old black & white tv (still did not have a colour set). Where did you find this? It looked like it has been kept on an ancient VHS hence the poor quality.
Thanks for uploading, brings back happy memories of those heady times when it seemed the whole world held its breath.
they're lucky the explosion from the CSM didn't damage the heat shield. after all they were coming in at 24000mph. how bad of shape was 13 in? what were the chances of the parachutes not deploying?
+derek wall Their velocity was about right for a lunar mission. The fastest re-entry capsule ever was actually Apollo 10, 36,360 feet per second or about 40,000 km/h. The Apollo command module was designed to land safely on just two of its three parachutes. They also "skipped" to a higher altitude and re-entered a second time in order to spread out the thermal load. The re-entry was one of the few things on Apollo 13 that went by the book. :P
CountArtha well in that case going by the book is the best way to go
They had a slight drift issue thanks to not carrying moon rocks but were just inside the entry corridor
lucky their heat sheild wasnt cracked, if it was they wouldve found out the hard way
@pt1gard
My guess is that the uploader got hold of an ancient VHS tape which would have deteriorated over the years and has not converted to digital all that well. I watched this at the time and the quality was quite good even by todays standards. But the quality here is not that important, the uploader is showing a bit of history as it happened, not entering into some silly hoax debate.
Space travel is not easy. Notice the time change in this video. They didnt arrive on schedule.
even the 1960s movies had color but this
Ever stuck your hand out of a car window doing 70 on a highway? It gets blown back quite a bit dosn't it. Now imagine doing that at 25000 mph - thats how hard the capsule is decelerated (5 x gravity at its peak). The CM hits the air so hard it gets turned into plasma (which is what causes the radio blackout).
Obviously that kind of speed would snap a parachute right off. So they don't even get deployed untill the capsule has slowed to a few hundred mph.
Now imagine trying to land a glider that’s still traveling over 200mph when you touch down, coming in over twice as steep as a commercial jet,and there were no go arounds. The shuttle went very fast but not quite as fast as a returning moon ship. Still, the plasma was what doomed Columbia
Back in the day when America was great......what happened?
They slashed the NASA budget for starters. It was around 4% of the entire US budget back then if I remember correctly. Now it's a measly 0.4%.
We’re still great
Does anyone have the names of the people in the BBC studio? Were they scientists or just journalists?
I wish I was 30 years older.
Just wondering, but why didn't the Apollo 13 crew put on their spacesuits after the explosion to keep warm?
They worried about sweating and ending up colder
For sure I don't want this for nobody, but I still doubt that next spaceships generation will perform that well in emergency cases as Apollo did. And I feel that perform is there in this case thanks to Grissom, White and Chaffee.
We should be more optimistic
Radio reporter @ frame 1:30: "Just about now they should be going through the moment of maximum hate"
WTF is "maximum hate" ?
HEAT
WHERE AND THE HECK DO YOU GET THESE VIDEOS
USA for the win!
WHERE DO YOU GET THESE VIDEOS
BBC used B&W webcam to record this
Doubt it, Quality will not be HD or anything like that as UK TV at the time were either 405 line monochome or 625 line 50 Hz PAL 25 FPS Colour format. Video Capture of 625 line film (which is also interlaced) only gives a quite small resolution image (smaller than 400 x 300 pixels). Enlargement will lead to Webcam type quality. Plus the original footage from the US navy recovery forces were filmed in NTSC 60Hz 29 FPS format which would have had to be processed through an analogue scan converter before it could be shown on UK TV.
BIGVERN1966 There's better copy of this footage - the BEEB just showed it.
Yep, watched it on BBC4 with my mum (Part of the Brian Cox night).
No, they didn't, they were about a minute late
WERE ARE THE PARACUTE?????
well' try to contact seal team 6 as they compliment there mission.
The camera seems to temporarily pan away from the CM as the main chutes are streaming. Was this to avoid exposing the TV public to the doomsday scenario of an unsurviveable impact with the Pacific had all 3 `mains` failed due to damage?
Paul Smith No, it was just hard to keep the tiny CM in the camera field.
Remember... people think this was all faked...
The US is the greatest country in the history
I imagine it's shit-your-pants worthy.
Humans FTW
6:19
@clintonearlwalker So they would just have a looong awful death.
They came out of blackout dead on schedule. Hollywood lied, as usual.
troll harder
The successful failure.