| The astronaut John L. Swigert had already travelled a quarter of the way to the moon before he remembered an important task he’d neglected back on Earth: taxes were due in a few days, and he hadn’t even started on his returns. Other than that, his situation seemed promising. It was April, 1970, less than a year since U.S. astronauts had triumphantly landed on the moon. As the Apollo 13 mission proceeded, “no one at the Space Center was thinking in terms of accidents,” Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., wrote in The New Yorker. NASA engineers would later be careful to describe the ensuing mishap not as an “explosion” but as a “tank failure.” Regardless of the official terminology, Swigert and his onboard colleagues, James A. Lovell, Jr., and Fred W. Haise, Jr., would soon be in mortal danger, their planned moon visit scuttled and their ability to get home suddenly uncertain. The incident, which began with one of the vessel’s two oxygen tanks, would set off a cascading series of risks and complications, each of which had to be addressed if the trio were to make it back to Earth—a journey that NASA optimistically planned for them to complete fifty-four years ago today. Shortly after the tank failure, Lovell reported to his counterparts in Houston that he could see a sheet of vapor outside the window. “Although Lovell’s voice was calm, what he was saying was as alarming as if a ship’s captain had reported seawater rushing in through the hull,” Cooper wrote. “Only the astronauts wouldn’t be able to jump into anything as hospitable as even an Arctic sea.” | 
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